I work as a computer technician for a retail company. I occasionally do side jobs (and I'm considering starting a business) where I am sometimes required to re-install or upgrade an OS, be it XP, Vista, or Win7. I currently use a standard backup software much like what you would find on an external drive that searches a customer's drive for common files then backs them up to a single folder while preserving the original structure. This leaves a lot of junk to sift through when copying back to the customer machine. I would like to find a good utility for actual migration that will allow me to hook up the customer drive before OS install and backup the common files, but then MIGRATE them to the new user profile on the refreshed or upgraded OS (which means the migration must be capable of migrating between windows OS's) so that the files are back in the usual locations for easy access by the customer. I've looked into PCMover which would be great accept for two issues: 1 license is for installing on one source and one destination (ie too expensive), software must be installed on both machines (or OS's if same machine). Many times when having to re-install an OS, installing a software on the customer machine before re-installing the OS is not feasible (however it's perfectly feasible to do on the re-installed or upgraded OS). If anybody knows of a good solution for this type of data backup and migration, please let me know. Thanks.

I don't Blame you. I'm so frustrated. I run Windows V7 Ultimate. I just purchased also Acronis. However my disk is configured as a Dyamic Disk because of the number of Partitions I have. I also have a lenovo USB disk. But Windows backup does not have the control flexibility to allow me to take any backup and intall a copy of the files on the Lenovo disk as a resource. This is so far advanced as to be impossible although I was doing it on VAXes 30 years ago. Acronis will not touch dynamic disks. Windows has put the backups on the Lenovo disks (on seperate partitions-The lenovo disk is not a dynamic disk). I don't get it. Renee

Renee...you might want to check out the following website: <cite>www.terabyteunlimited.com/</cite> I can't remember offhand if their imaging tool supports RAID, but I'm almost certain it does. I've used nothing but their software for all my partition management and imaging needs for years. Although I've never used it with a RAID setup, so it may be an exercise in futility. Either way, they know how to make software that revolves around superior functionality rather than aesthetics, so you might find it useful even if it doesn't handle RAID.

Thank you, I don't need RAID but I do use an SSD. So whatever I chose will have to support them, which I don't think is a biggy. Renee

The company looked good!!! Renee

Glad I could be of some help. Please let me know how it worked for you once you've had a chance to test it out....it always feels good to know if a suggestion of mine helped somebody :-D