There are tons of backup utilities. I was recently looking for something very, very simple however, with great potential, so I'm now backing up my laptop with VMWare. I use VMWare Converter to generate an image of my laptop on an external USB disk and access the backup image using VMWare Disk Mount Utility. Both of these tools are free to use without purchase.
There's the added potential with Converter of going virtual for good. I didn't just ghost the disk, I created a virtual machine image of my physical machine. I'm running Windows XP on my Thinkpad and was seriously considering going Linux and running XP virtualized for eternity. The virtual Windows machine needs to reregister my Windows license - and I haven't tried that yet, so can't tell you if that is going to cause me administrative problems or not - but the backup solution is nice enough and really, really simple - essentially one-click.
I'm sure there are tons of ghosting tools out there, but the potential to just run the VMWare image directly is so appealing.
Posted by Claus at October 23, 2007 3:27 AMIt will also let you boot your backup image on another machine if your laptop dies completely.
Posted by: Simon at October 23, 2007 4:43 PMI can "unvirtualize" again - or are you just talking about the "run as virtualized" scenario I'm talking about?
Posted by: Claus at October 23, 2007 4:45 PM