Anyone tried to backup a laptop lately? Now the proud owner of a new, state of the art laptop, I tried imaging it…dear God, it can’t be this hard, can it?

Not wanting to part with even more cash, I tried to image it using Windows Backup & Recovery – this ‘sees’ network drives and my disk image ‘share’….great – I thought.

Then the woeful problem appeared, that the laptop has a ‘recovery partition’ – very common these days – but Windows Backup & Recovery does not see this partition – because it’s hidden.

Ok, so on to another stalwart of the disk imaging world Macrium Reflect (free edition). This sees all partitions, and allows you to select the partitions to backup – fantastic!

Only issue is, Macrium could not see any network shares or devices. So I now have a choice – one product can not see all the partitions and the other can not see the network – rendering them both pretty useless for my purposes.

Great!

After testing a plethora of alternative software, looks like I’ll have to shell out for Symantec Ghost Solution Suite – as nothing else appears to work. I have never had Ghost fail in corporate environments, where other software – even the venerable Acronis solutions have failed.

I wonder if it is too much to ask – the ability to just reliably image a machine over the network – without having to pay a small  fortune?