I’d recommended looking at a small disk imager called Snapshot I’d found on tinyapps.org. I’d given it a little look-see. But now I’ve put it to the test: I did a full image of my laptop’s hard drive, reformatted, and restored it. Yup, the compact little bugger works.

It did take a little coaching from the creator who responded to my plaintive email ridiculously quickly and helpfully. I had to restore in DOS mode, and my laptop wouldn’t recognize the USB hard drive that contained the image. Tom recommended NTFSDOS, a freeware program that gives drive letters to your mass media. Miles of tinyapps.org says that had I used the UDMA driver included with Snapshot, the process would have been speeded up many times. (I don’t know what that means, but I trust Miles implicitly. He was ridiculously helpful during the restore process, too.)

Snapshot costs 40 euros, which is just about 50 in American. Well worth it for this one episode. Plus, once I get it set up right, it should be fast enough to make imaging my hard drive a regular part of my backup-and-floss regime.

Categories: Uncategorized dw