gdjacobs wrote:

Ghost is pretty good. The only weakness is the anemic networking support (depends on what's built into the DOS boot disk).

Which is why you should use the one above instead, it supports nearly every network interface you can think of, except for the parallel port ones.

gdjacobs wrote:

Ghost is pretty good. The only weakness is the anemic networking support (depends on what's built into the DOS boot disk).

I always install an extra HDD (or a CF card) in my retro systems just for storing ghost partition images (my systems are almost always multiboot) of the same system. Then I can back them up to any computer/external HDD that I connected to the home network by using "more conventional networking methods" like Windows 3.11 or Windows 9x or Windows 2000 that has been already installed in the same system. One copy is ready to use in the system and one copy in another place for backup. Safe and practical. And probably much easier than dealing with console commands and Unix style device names. 😊

I had the same problem looking for old disk imaging software. After many test and issues I ended using the simplest solution: 7zip. It is fast (there is 0 compression), portable (DOS, Win9x, Win10, Linux, macOS, etc) and most important it is easy to check what's inside, eg. just to get one file like autoexec.bat. You can do the backup straight on the machine with a floppy or by card reader on modern PC and it will work cross platform.

My routine is:
1. install Win98,
2. 7zip WINDOWS and Program Files folders (or whole C: drive),
3. install drivers, software, etc,
4. when something goes wrong, delete WINDOWS and Program Files folders and extract them from backup
5. repeat from 3

ok never thought of that, maybe give that ago

the Partition-Saving home page
http://damien.guibouret.free.fr/en/index.html

Download page
http://damien.guibouret.free.fr/en/telechargement.html