What is the best Hard Drive Image freeware?

[minc3d]

I have been using in the same manner for a while now. I have one copy purchased which only gets installed on a single system which I browse images from, but do backups from other PCs using their LiveCD to a network share. The LiveCD is merely an intermediary to make the backup files; the backup files are all handled by the single installation after that point.

I wouldn't imagine they would let you make a LiveCD to backup your own system that already has Acronis installed on it.

 

[coreyspeed]

Ive been beating my brain on this issue for too long. I dont know why I havent asked this before myself.

Anyone know out of the recommended software, besides Acronis, which do the following:

1) Allow for the use of a boot cd directly off the host to do an image to a network share.
2) Allow you to browse images without restoring them, and pluck individual files out of the image.

Acronis does this well but is of couse paid software on each upgrade and I don't want to keep paying the upgrade fee.

Any ideas?

also adding on to this
3) able to boot backup software from a PXE server ?

 

[DanB]

Second on Redo

Have you tried Redobackup? it's free

http://redobackup.org/

I have used RedoBackup a few times with good results. It also has some nice tools included like restoring a hardrive to a factory state. I have used that feature multiple times.

I have used it for creating a image of fresh installs after drivers are loaded and put the iso file with the backup.