Take THAT, Norton Ghost!
So I recently got a new laptop, and it came with XP Home, which as we all know, isn’t very cool. XP Home is the kid who pretended he didn’t want lunch, when in fact, he was simply too poor to eat. So I bought a copy of XP Media Center Edition (i.e.: The kid who always was showing off his “Lunchables”) to put on it. There are two interesting facts about this:
- Windows XP MCE is windows Professional (the installer even says so), so it can join a domain, features all the user and security management tools, has file encryption, and Terminal Server built in. I don’t think Microsoft wants you to know this, though, as the full version of XP MCE costs $130 whereas the XP Pro costs $147 (prices from NewEgg).
- Sony ships laptops with drivers that aren’t installable on XP MCE (at least, following instructions, I was unable to do so). So to upgrade, you have to upgrade to XP Professional, then “Repair” your Pro install with MCE.
So, I get my laptop all set up with XP Home and then realize that I don’t have Terminal Server/Remote Desktop, or file encryption (two things I like to have on my laptop). But I know that I have to do “#2″, above. What I need to do is back up my hard drive. Now, there are some ways to do this… like booting to knoppix and using `dd` to write it out to a samba share somewhere. But that’s annoying. What I need is an automated way to do it. And Norton Ghost costs money. Money I don’t want to spend, already having blown cash on a laptop and Windows.
Enter Partimage. Partimage is… well… read the site, fool! Basically it lets you back up your partitions, excluding free space, to a file, or to a server running their `partimaged` daemon. It understands most disk formats (XFS, Ext2, FAT, NTFS (experimental!)), can gzip/bzip2 your files, or span them across multiple chunks, and it can also restore the files, locally or from the server, at pretty amazing speeds (It takes about 5 minutes per gig, over a 100Mb network link). Though their NTFS support is “experimental” it backed up my disk and restored it just fine.
You can run it from the System Rescue CD to back up or restore, and it’s frickin’ SWEET. Most of all because it works, and that bastard in the pink shirt* doesn’t get any of my hard-earned cash.
Note: I see that the esteemed ESR has decided to move some terms out of the jargon lexicon. I’m one who believes that the Jargon File, being, after all, about Jargon, shouldn’t prune based on the “Jargonosity” of an entry, if at all. If we start removing historical references, all we’ll have left are entries like “intarweb” and “lunix” and “zomgroflbrbbbq” which is, well, stupid.