backup software that ignores user rights

Question

As a computer technician I have to reinstall systems allmost daily (when it can't be repaired ;-)) My problem is that I recover user files by hand and a external mounting device. Most of the time it works fine, but also weekly I have systems with passwords and personal files which are often not sucessfull recovered.

I know you can change owner, but when people have 30 GB's af data, my backup computer works for ages to change the rights.

Can anyone think of software (commercial is no problem) which does the following:

* backup user data without having user rights troubles
* have a option to choose what to backup (email accounts, documents, etc, etc)
  even when it's externaly mounted, in short, it reconizes the folder structure)
* Works on different OS's like XP, Vista, W7

Answer 1

A somewhat low-tech solution: Back up to a FAT32 file system instead of NTFS. Since FAT does not support User Permissions that gets rid of the ACLs.

As FAT32 has a 4 GB Filesize limit, exFAT may be an alternative as well.

Answer 2

There are Windows and Cygwin versions of dd available. The drive naming syntax can be tricky, but once you get that down, dd makes exact copies of disks for you.