Making a perfect backup of a hard drive with multiple partitions.

Cramit

I am about to re-enter the land of multiple OSes with my new windows laptop (been in Mac land since 2006) and was looking for any tools (preferably free) that I can use to make back-ups of the entire disk. I need to be able to restore the disk including it's boot loader. I know I can use dd from a live cd, but I would love something a little more user-friendly and run from within windows if possible. Thanks!

George Patches

Just use virtual machines.

Cramit

That is one option, but I still need a robust backup tool. I have been using Super-duper on my mac, and would love to find something similar for windows.

Apreche

What exactly do you want to back up? There's no reason to backup anything that can be redownloaded or reinstalled. All you need to backup are your irreplaceable documents. Just manually copy them to an external drive and also the cloud, such as Amazon S3, Carbonite, etc.

George Patches

This, is the new cool thread.

Walker

This, is the new cool thread.

...And then I posted in it.

YoshoKatana

rsync?

George Patches

Awww damn it, other people know about it!

YoshoKatana

1. Awww damn it, other people know about it!

You gotta go retro, man. Here.

Dr. Timo

If you are running the backup of OS X then I can recommend carbon copy cloner, it's free and should do what you want. I used it myself until I switched to chronosync, but that costs money but it does the network backup stuff much better than CCC.

However, if you're just going to make a bit to bit copy onto an internal/USB drive you should just write a script using dd or rsync once. It's not like you're going to need a UI to set something that simple up.