[l008com]

By my simple math, it should take about 13 minutes to image a 40 GB hard drive over FireWire. Now, that is 'optimal' I know. BUT, from my expirience, and others too, it seems to take Disk Utility 1 hour for each 20 GB of a drive. That seems really extreme for me. It kills me because when I'm upgrading a client's computer, it can now take hours and hours just to do a simple hard drive swap. Using Disk Utility's Restore feature seems to have the same problem, like it only runs at 1/5th speed. There has to be a better why? One possability I thought of was manually making the disk image (though even making a blank 30 GB disk image took a curiously large amount of time), and then using CarbonCopyCloaner to copy everything to the image. I haven't ran any tests yet so I don't really know if, and by how much, faster that would be. But I suspect it would be a good amount faster. Any other ideas? Something I don't know about maybe?

[gorickey]

I use NetRestore from Bombich (same developer that does CCC) to create and then deploy my images. The creation of the image does take awhile, I'd say about 35-45 minutes (for 30-40 GB drives) depending on the size of your HD and how much stuff you have on it of course. However, the deployment of that image (either via NetBoot or say a FW drive) takes no more than 7 minutes (again on the 30 and 40 GB iBook drives I've tested this on)...

If I were you, I would make some images from scratch to have around that have various things on them for different clients. Then, I would image the drive when they are being "upgraded"...anything you left off the image that they want, you can simply add yourself. And of course, you can just save their "User" folder and keep all their important files and such.