What's a good system for storing hard drive images

Question

I'd like to study the effects my software has on different OS environments. I've determined the best way to analyze the differences involves storing the entire hard drive image as soon as the software is finished executing.

What's a painless system (including both the hardware and software) that will allow me to quickly hookup desktop and laptop hard drives from other computers and store their images and can be easily retrieved later on?

With the little I currently know, one straight forward way would be to have a dedicated desktop computer that has...

1. A copy of Norton Ghost to create the images
2. An (array of) external hard drive to store the images
3. A Notebook Hard Drive to Desktop Adapter (2.5" to 3.5") to hookup laptop drives

Does anyone have any better ideas? I suppose I should mention cost is an issue, so you get bonus points for inexpensive solutions :)

Thanks in advance, I really appreciate it!

Answer 1

For the problem the way you describe it, your solution seems like a good one. That's how I've seen similar problems addressed at places I've worked.

If you're not trying to debug hardware issues, you might consider using a virtual machine (VMWare, Virtual PC, etc.) instead of imaging real hard drives. For each software configuration you want to test, have a separate VM with its virtual hard drive.

Answer 2

You can reduce the software cost a bit by using PartImage. This is a linux/unix program that saves/restores entire partitions, like norton ghost. It can backup and restore many filesystems including Microsoft's FAT and NTFS. It can be run from most of the many linux live CD's.

For your usage I would setup dedicated linux machine with PartImage installed and plug source & destination disks in as needed. I would also use a disk dock, Like This. Drop a bare drive in the dock. Then read or write as needed.

From the description of the problem, disk space will be a major cost. PartImage does not store the empty sectors of the file system. With at 50% full 80Gig partition PartImage would only write 40Gig, or even less with the optional compression.

I have personally done this approach, but on a smaller scale. I only keep 5-6 partition images at a time. The only fault that I have found with PartImage is that when writing partition images to FAT or NTFS there is a 2Gig limit on file size. This is not really a problem in practice as PartImage seamlessly splits images into multiple files of a size you specify.

Answer 3

Have you considered Virtualisation of one form or another? This is what thousands of other developers are using for compatibility testing. It's quick, cheap and pretty good. That said if you want to have your OS running on 'bare metal' then just 'Ghosting' to a big USB drive from a boot CD should give you what you want, bit of a faff though to be honest.