Backup program

  • Thread starter Thread starter JBrown
  • Start date Start date
Acronis TrueImage HOME edition is easy to use. It does help though if you
read the help file and learn a bit about partitions and file structures.
 
If you want to make a back-up of your entire drive be aware that regardless
of program when crunch times comes the restoration may not complete
properly.
I have not seen any back-up program that is entirely reliable.
It isn't that they never work its just that, like Windows System Restore, it
often does not work when you need it the most.
A free alternative that seems to work as well as paid programs is
DriveImage.
If you wiped your old OS and used Windows 7 upgrade disc you may wish you
had a usable backup of your pre-Win 7 OS.
It is easiest to restore a back-up of your hard drive if the backup is on a
second internal hard drive.
 
              I am looking for a good easy to use backup program. I now have
Norton  Ghost and it is hard to use. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

                               thank you,
                            ([email protected])
Click to expand...

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Choose carefully!

You might want to look into Rebit...

http://www.rebit.com/


I bought the software and devoted a Maxtor drive to it, but I haven't
tried it yet. I plan to reinstall Vista and an going to wait until
then.


Bill
 
rak said:
Macrium Reflect.
Click to expand...

Only a single experience with it, but it looks like what I have
been needing for many years, for the single purpose of copying the
Windows partition/drive and restoring it to the same drive. It
gives an option to restore the boot sector to exactly the way it
was when the copy was made. Having used many different disk
managers over the years, after Windows 98, I have regularly had a
problem with probably either BOOT.INI or the boot sector somehow
being changed between when the copy was made and the copy was
restored. And the thing makes the copy without even exiting
Windows. And the copy is much smaller than my primary SSD drive
that it copies. And it handled the SSD drive properly. Yup,
preliminarily speaking, it looks like my new baby.
 
It only creates that partition if you tell it to!

Here is a good reason for that partition.

A few years back I spent about 10 hours setting up a companies server. When
I was done I created an image of the system using PowerQuest Drive Image. I
saved the image to another hard drive on the server and to an external hard
drive.

The owner called me in because the server had crashed (bad primary hard
drive. No problem. I installed a new hard drive and was about to restore the
image when the s**t hit the fan. My image was not there. I went to the
external hard drive. The image was not there.

Upon questioning the owner it came to be that he was house cleaning and
forgot that I told him to never touch the image files. He deleted the files
to get more space on each of the hard drives (even though they were 50%
empty). You can't account for stupidity.

Had I been able to store the image in a hidden partition on the second drive
I would have been able to restore his server in 10-15 minutes. Now it was
going to take another 10 hours to build it back up from scratch.

I was so pissed that I didn't care about the money. I cursed him out, called
him the jackass that he was and walked out of his building to never return.
 
vista said:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Choose carefully!

You might want to look into Rebit...

http://www.rebit.com/


I bought the software and devoted a Maxtor drive to it, but I haven't
tried it yet. I plan to reinstall Vista and an going to wait until
then.


Bill
Click to expand...

Bill,
I bought a copy for one of my laptops. It is as easy as they advertised.
The only drawback is you need a dedicated drive the same size as your
hard drive and it doesn't let you select what you want to backup. In my
case, I already had the drive and I don't want the user to be able to
screw with the backup parameters. It was just what I wanted. Now he just
needs to remember to plug it in :-)

The first backup takes a while but after that it only backs up the
changes. It can also do a full restore. I tested them both and they
worked. You can find on sale for less than $30 us

gls858
 
Strangely, I have to power off the computer instead of just
restart, when using the default restore CD. But that is a minor
issue, considering the fact that restores are done much less
frequently than backups. My second trial restore went just as well
as the first, except for having to completely shut down before
booting to the restore CD (but, again, that is a trivial issue).
 
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