ToolPackinMama said:
What is the best way to capture a copy of your main partition,
once you have laboriously performed a clean install and
reinstalled and updated ~everything~.
Incremental backup of my installation is exactly the reason I started
making copies of the Windows partition long long ago. If you can do
it, your system becomes nearly bulletproof.
What program/procedure do you use?
Currently I use Acronis Disk Director. I keep the boot disks from Disk
Director, Partition Manager, Partition Magic, and more recently the
Windows 7 beta will be my fourth. You never know which boot disk will
work when things go bad. To help avoid complications, I should
probably get out of the habit of copying the Windows partition to the
primary area and instead copy it to the extended partition area. I did
that probably because with Windows 95 and Windows 98 any of the three
allow partitions were bootable. But that was not a good idea to begin
with anyway, because generally you want to avoid corrupting a backup
copy.
So... the easiest and safest way probably would be to use Acronis Disk
Director to copy the Windows partition to the secondary partition area
and then to hide that copy.
Always keep a removable media copy of important files from your hard
drive.
I assume the best thing is to capture the image to removable
media, but what if your main partition contents won't fit on a
standard DVD? Do you use external hard drives for such backups?
Tell me your secrets, plz thx.
Just copy the Windows partition to the same hard drive and hide it.
You never know when a hard drive will fail, but that is what removable
media backup of important data is for. Keeping important data copied
to removable media is a great complement to keeping a copy of the
Windows partition on the same hard drive. With an easy to access
backup copy of Windows, developing your installation effectively never
ends. Like with any installation, identify and regularly make backup
copies of important data. Naturally that is data that changes from
time to time. So... when something goes wrong with your installation
and you do not want to mess with troubleshooting it... make a fresh
copy of important data to removable media (do that immediately
whenever you even think about restoring Windows), start your disk
manager and use it to queue up the following actions... delete your
current Windows partition, copy a hidden copy Windows from the
secondary partition area to the primary area copy you just deleted,
and then unhide and make active that known good backup replacement.
Then you restart your computer and watch the magic. If you are dual
booting, you need to make sure your PC boots to the correct partition.
You will learn what needs to be backed up before restoring a copy of
Windows, every time you do a restoration and find that some data is no
longer available. You also develop a list of what needs to be changed
and what new stuff needs to be installed. So the next time you do a
replacement/restoration... you make configuration changes and install
new stuff to make the copy better, then you copy that updated
installation.
Keep a copy of Windows, and all of your concerns about Windows things
getting messed up fade away. It is a whole new world.
By the way. My main partition including programs is not too big, so I
do not mess with trying to keep programs on a different partition and
that is not a concern in the backup/restore process here.
