Hey there,

Can anyone suggest the best backup, rescue and recovery software to use. Not a big fan if Norton so dont want to use Ghost really. Does anyone know any other decent or really good ones?

Damien

Define "decent o really good"

What do you want this sotware to do?

You could just use Windows Explorer to copy two files to a floppy disk every day for all we know

Sorry, I want it to be able to take an exact backup of my hard disk whenever I ask it to, or have scheduled backups copying data, settings, the lot. If something ever goes wrong with an update or something like that then I can use the software to boot to and restore the hard disk and all its contents to the state it was in the backup.

Damien

Get Acronis True Image, it can backup a whole HD, followed by incremental changes if you so desire.
Re-installing a taken image takes only a few minutes.
For it to work best, either get an extra internal hard disk (preferred method) for these images, or get a good external harddisk (USB2.0 or Firewire).
Or if you can find it, get the last DriveImage version before Symantec bought it and ballsed it up.

I quite agree with RealBlackStuff. I also don’t like Ghost it is more expensive than True Image and has less functiuns. Ghost can't create differential backups, it is more expensive and unlike True Image it can't backup certain files or folders (it operates only with full drives or partitions). After all True Image supports MS Vista.