What Program Needed To Create Disk Image Backups?

I would have asked this question in my thoughts on OS 12 thread, only I thought this was a very important question to ask, so I rather it be where other's can find it, so they have the solution as well. I went into the Disks utility and tried to create a disk image backup of my main drive, but since the drive was mounted of course, it gave me an error message. Now, I have Acronis True Image which works great for that, but its for Windows, and does not work properly under Wine, or at least it didn't when I tried with Wine on OS 9. Is there a free program that I can use to create a full disk image backup?

The idea is, incase my OS gets bricked again, I can boot up off some CD or whatever to restore the disk image backup I made to get me back up and running again. Oh ya thats another thing, whatever program it be, its got to use disk boot loading, it can't rely on the booting into the OS, cause as I am sure you've guessed, if the OS is bricked, that is no help there. lol Any and all help appreciated in this matter, thankyou

Are you telling me Aaron's no longer allows you to create boot media? I backed up Ultimate Edition 2.9 and Sabayon 4 using Aaron's boot media (but never attempted a restore. If you are not bothered about minutii then use redo backup from redo backup. or for complete drive backup or use Clone illa or use Back in time that other users have been asking for in 12 but not implemented.

Yes, that is basically what I am interested in doing, is making a cloned image of the whole drive. That should include all the parititions on the drive, hence the only real sure proof way to backup your computer, so that if a restoration is necessary, it can be gone about without any worries. The problem with backing up folders and files on the HD using Zorin's built in backup software, is it no doubt will not backup the partitions of the drive, so if your MBR gets toast for example, well, your shinola out of luck there buddy. Thanks for the recommendations, I am going to be checking them out now.

Alright, I finally made some backup headway. After careful consideration, I chose Backup Redo for its simplicity and GUI interface. Word of warning, this program likes to be on CD's, not more modern DVD's, if you use a DVD to place the ISO on, it will not boot the computer into the GUI, so only use a CD.

Also, when you get to the point of selecting the source drive to backup from, you will notice that it can see your Zorin distrobution, and it will default to it. Do not try to backup from that as you will get an error. Use the dropdown box and select your actual hard drive with its name in it, for example, mine is Samsung. Then on the next page it will ask you which partitions you wish to backup, I suggest you back them all up for piece of mind, so make sure each box is checkmarked, mine only had two boxes so I guess two partitions.

You have multiple choices when it comes to chooses where to send the backup, you could backup to an external hard drive, USB drive, provided the USB drive has enough space however, or you could backup to a network share. I did check out the network share option, and it was discovering a few shares on my network, but it wasn't seeing the ones I needed to backup. I also have the option to manually input the address to the network share, but since I don't know the specific address, I didn't want to risk it.

So instead I backed up to my 1TB external hard drive connected via US 3.0 port, this process took hours to backup a total of 10.9GB of data. When I woke up from getting a terrible night sleep due to heavy wind gusts waking me up all hours of the night due to storms, I took the GUI out of suspend mode and it told me the backup was finished. I then exited and rebooted the program, it ejected the CD and the computer rebooted into normal Zorin OS 12 Linux.

In order to send the backup to the server, I accessed the external hard drive via Zorin and copied and pasted the backup folder on the external HD, to my file server on the network. So now its backed up in two places for redundancy. I thought the GUI interface was very user friendly, so it gets a real plus there. Of course the real test of this software is if I ever have to actually use the backup to restore my computer to a functioning state, that will be the real test Attached is a screenshot showing the backup in process.

Just be advised that this project is not active but still relevant as a backup solution

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=8879&p=42905&hilit=Redo#p42905

OK guys, you are not going to believe this. You'd think I'd learn the first time but apparantly not. I bricked my OS swtiching to an proprietary Nvidia driver. Why did I do this? Because the built in Linux driver does a poor job of use my Nvidia graphics card, practically not at all. And because of this I get some miner tearing and bad performance in Doom. I wish that Linux had a driver that would actually work for games, its so stupid to have a Nvidia graphics card for gaming and not even be able to use it. I was hoping that OS 12 would have been an improvement in that area but guess not. It might also be the case that a certain Nvidia proprietary driver would work fine under linux, its just that the versions in the list under additional drivers do not.

So anyways, I am so thankful that I made that backup with Redo, cause I used it to restore my PC. And now I can officially tell you that Redo is freaking awesome!!! It brought my PC back to what it was when I backed it up. All I had to do was use Synaptic Package Manager (A app which I adore BTW) to reinstall K3B and Hard Info.