On Tue, 3 Jan 2006 21:57:30 -0600, "Xu" <xuxuxuxu@yahoo.com>
wrote:

>I am trying to learn how to clone my drive. I have dabbled with it and I see
>that the actual image would be 32gig in size. I am wondering what I can do
>to make this process smaller? I wonder if I reformatted and put XP on a
>separate partition if that would help because right now two clone programs I
>have tried both want to copy the hole HDD. I assume that is because I have
>everything on one partition.
>
>I have no floppy, so trying to use the disks for boot up is not much of an
>option for me unless I can use one of my sd disks in the card reader.
>
>What I want is a full copy of my system, and all the files that install in
>the Programs folder. That is all I want. I don't care about anything else,
>so it does not seem necessary that I copy the whole drive, which is actually
>a 75gig drive.
>

Simply put the things you don't want in the partition image
"clone" onto another partition first. When such things
require identification of their location (applications) you
may need to reinstall them. There is no need for even 1/4th
of a 32GB partition for windows alone, and you probably do
not need continual backups of the program files folder
because most of those will not be subject to failure. You
might consider making one backup of all of this, THEN with
further backups only the things most subject to problems.