Not sure if this is the right place for this thread, but hopefully you guys can help me out.

I'm thinking about ordering this Seagate hard drive:

http://shop1.outpost.com/product/4008252

And then installing it in an external case to go with my laptop. The only thing is that i would like some backup software so i can create an image of my laptop hard drive to backup onto the external hard drive.

Thanks

If you are running Windows XP, you could make use of the built-in backup utility. It's not the best in the world, but for many occasions it will do.

If not, you can look into other products like Norton Ghostor Arconis True image (there are more, I know) .

You could check sites like Tucows and Download.com for less features but perhaps free replacements.

Of course, there are free Linux alternatives as well, but I don't know if you want to look into those kind of things..

Dee-ehn, thanks for the reply. I think i might look into Norton Ghost and maybe a couple others on the internet.

And no, i probably won't mess with anything that deals with Linux

Any imaging program what runs in Windows will be able to see the external drive. Acronis TrueImage is the favorite right now. Ghost-9 is now a pale reflection of DriveImage 7, since Symantec bought PowerQuest. Acronis seems to have the most bang for the buck.

If you can find an old DriveImage 7, that will also do nicely. I'm not sure if you can use any of the DOS based programs with an external drive, but I doubt it.
Personally, I have reservations about "hot-imaging" in Windows, but that's me.

If you have a few GB of space available on the laptop HD, why not create a separate partition for the image files, then you can do whatever you like with them, and any imaging program will do.

It's indeed kind of hard to get USB drives to work in dos. That's too bad, as it would have been quite useful (that's a problem a Linux based solution doesn't have ).

Putting the image on a separate partition of the harddrive is of course possible, but in case your harddrive crashes or your partition table is corrupted, it may be hard / impossible to recover the image.

Another solution is to burn the image to DVDR(W). In that way you circumvent the whole problem. Of course, if you have a gigantic amount of data backupping to DVD is a little cumbersome, but I somehow guess that your laptops harddrive isn't that big...

I use the second partition approach on my laptop, then copy the image files to an external drive or accross a network connection, as well as burning to DVD. That way the files are available on the HD, and still backed up if there's a hardware crash.