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To: chuckles

Aside from having a RAID setup, here's the system I use on other computers that I have and a few of the systems I built for the office....

The best media to back up to is... another local (on the same computer) hard drive. They're fast and they're still the cheapest storage medium in terms of bytes per dollar. You can use a networked drive, but restoring a system would still require installing the OS and getting it up on the network. Too slow!

A good backup system has two facets... (1) A daily backup that only copies new and recently changed files using most any file-copy utility and (2) imaging the drive (or only the partition containing the Boot Sector and OS since all other files can simply be copied) only when major changes have been made. Either recent versions of Norton Ghost or PowerQuest Drive Image will work fine with imaging Windows XP (note that Symantec now owns PowerQuest).

If you don't make frequent major changes to your OS (like installing new software, patches, service packs, etc.), there's no need to make frequent images. Any file copy program can be used to back up and restore regular non-system files without any hassle.

If you go with an extra drive for backup purposes, make sure that the drive isn't used for anything else so to prevent corruption. Don't rely on an external drive since performing a restore might require installing the OS and drivers first unless your BIOS can access it directly. An internal hard drive is preferred.

With this system, I have brought back computers from catastrophic hard drive failures in usually less than 1/2 hour after replacing the faulty drive. Every setting and every file is restored just as it was when it was last backed up.


16 posted on 12/08/2004 1:06:28 AM PST by Outland (Human Induced Gobal Warming: The largest socialist scam in history.)
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To: Outland
I agree with most of what you said except: Don't rely on an external drive since performing a restore might require installing the OS and drivers first unless your BIOS can access it directly. An internal hard drive is preferred.

You are correct that a "cold" restore requires using media that the BIOS can use to boot. Some software does not recognize external USB even if the BIOS could boot from it. The problem with internal drives is that one form of system failure is a power spike from the power supply. One of my friends had this happen and NOTHING on the machine worked afterwords. Unfortunately, this could wipe out both copies.

As an aside, the Backup utility of XP Pro is not too bad. It doesn't compress, but it will save your entire drive WITH registry and installed software. It will also configure to allow verifying the saved content as soon as the copy is performed. What, you say you never do that? Well, having spent over 30 years in the computer business I can tell you that you don't want to find out that the backup is unreadable AFTER the primary copy has gone south! Been there. Done that.

Individual files, or the whole shooting match can be restored. Shortcomings are that documentation isn't all that complete. One of the Microsoft "gurus" describing it suggested that "the best place to keep the backup was on a separate partition of the same drive". Occasionally, even the "experts" say things which are downright ditzy.

XP Pro, you say! Most of us have XP Home. Well, it turns out that MS included the backup utility on the XP Home install CD under a directory named "ValueAdd" or some such name. Just run the ntbackup.msi file and it installs itself. I did this on my home machine two nights ago. The readme file informs you that the ASR function won't work with XP Home. This means you will have to install a working version of XP Home if you need a full disk restore. Then you can restore over the fresh install picking up all the rest of the intsalled software as well as the XP updates. When you are faced with rebuilding your entire system, this is a minor price to pay.

For media, I suggest buying an external shell which accepts raw IDE drives and plugs in with USB2.0. I bought one from Fry's Electronics for about $60. Don't skimp, the plastic ones fall apart. I also bought a couple of huge drives to slap into the case. Now I backup my laptop and my desktop to this external.

Since it's unplugged most of the time, I don't need to worry about the power surge problem.

As an added bonus, you can use the better cases for a DVD drive. You will find that the internal DVD drives cost less and if you put it in the case you can use it for multiple machines.

30 posted on 12/08/2004 1:32:58 AM PST by the_Watchman
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