brett <account@cygen.com> wrote:

> xxclone sounds like a neat tool.

Its a tad downmarket in many ways. And surprisingly slow too.

> However, I would like to have incrementals that don't require
> a complete restore. So I may need to get my MS Money file
> from 2 days ago. The imaging or cloning alone won't allow that.

Both will. A clone is an identical copy of the drive when it was done and you
can certainly manually copy whatever you want off the clone if you need it.

Any decent imager allows you to browse the image and get individual files too.

> Perhaps I should just forget about a mirrored drive and go with
> incremental imaging and regular backups so that I can have file
> by file restores plus fast catostrophic failure restores.

Yes, that is what most do. If you want to avoid the delay while
you get the replacement drive on drive failure, you can just buy
it now and then its available immediately if you ever do need it.

> For incremental imaging, say I take a full image on Saturday and do
> incrementals each day than have the drive crash on Wednesday. Do I
> need to first do the full restore and then apply in order the four incrementals?

No, with True Image you tell it to restore the the lastest and
it automatically restores all the ones done before that too.

And you can selectively restore too, so if you know things went pear shaped
on Tuesday, you can say restore from Monday and before that if you want to.

> Just like a database restore. I gues it isn't so bad if you want
> protection from both types of failures (file by file and catostrophic).

Yeah, the only real downside over a clone is that it takes a
little longer to have a usable system after a drive failure, but
thats hardly ever that important with a personal system.