Posted on 07/20/2009 8:25:25 AM PDT by Frantzie
I came in nn it appears a harddrive was failing. Jumped in the car to take it to the computer guy. I should have a solid backup to restore plus I had a new 80 gig HD in a box.
My new HP have Vista 64 with SP2. I love my new computer.
So there you have it.
It appears that we have a clear consensus. You should probably either use:
Carbonite,
mirroring,
an external hard drive,
a USB drive,
MozyPro,
Backup Exec System Recovery,
Windows Home Server,
Clonezilla,
GParted,
Windows backup,
CDs or DVDs,
CloneGenius2008,
Norton Ghost,
Acronis True Image,
or Drive Image XML.
Yup. Thanks to all. I have an older copy of Acronis true Image on another old machine which I never go around to using. I hate buying download software in case I want to take it off another machine and move it.
Depending on your requirements...
I’ve been transitioning heavily to http://www.portableapps.com - tools & utilities optimized to run on a USB drive. Keep the bulk of it on my 2GB “thumb drive”, and the rest on a pocket 250GB drive. Backup is simply a matter of copying.
Trying to classically backup a Windows box has never worked for me; accessing the archived files is at best painful, if possible at all. Going this way, the backup is fully functional, plug-and-go, on any Windows box any time.
pinging myself
This thread is an example of the awesomeness of FR. Many great answers here.
I’m on 2k and Ghost is quite sufficient for my needs. If you can get the old drive to work “one last time” your chances are pretty good you can recover everything yourself, no muss no fuss. It’ll put everything where it needs to be and the only fix you’ll need to do is wipe the registry entries for drive letters before you Ghost it, so it’ll read as C: when you boot the new drive.
Really, if the new one will work for any time at all, your chances with Ghost are excellent. I’ve recovered drives that were kachunking that way before. Figure roughly 1 minute per GB. It’s also tolerant of different partitioning schemes or non-identical drives, unlike Maxblast or similar.
I went from a dying 80 GB partitioned roughly 20/60 (not counting the overhead of course) to a 160 GB partitioned 60/100. Effortless! Ganked the registry entries for drive letter, Ghosted my boot partition which took 20-25 min, then manually copied the data from D: over selectively since I didn’t feel like keeping it all. So very simple!
Time Machine.
Just pick a date and time you want to restore to.
Oh wait, that is on iMac only. :)
Had a gal at the photo department tell me that you can buy digital chips for a digital camera, plug the chip into a USB accessing driver and download computer data to a tiny little chip like you insert into a camera for 16gig picture storage. I think she’s right, but the sticks are so cheap, I just use them instead. Besides, the camera chips are notorious for ‘crashing’.
Thanks. What version of Ghost are you using.
It is at the guy I use and hopefully I get it back late this afternoon. He peformed a miracle for me before. It was booting in black screen safe mode so hopefully he can get the data. I should have a external backup from this weekend. I made sure to start it Friday.
Landlord has been shutting AC almost off on nights and weekends so it gets war 85+ but also humid. The humidity is what worries me.
They used to run it 24x7 pre-Obama.
Just plug in a new drive and use Ghost boot ROM?
Ghost 10, so the exact steps might vary for later versions, but it’s pretty simple. Honestly, you’ll have no trouble figuring it out from the previous post once you’re looking at it.
Install a large slave drive in your PC.
Partition it as you like but keep a large one for backups of your C:drive.
Download and install a free program called Macrium Reflect. This little beauty uses VSS (Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service) to take a snapshot of your C:drive and then back it up to an XML file. This means you can get a full image of your C:drive WHILE WINDOWS IS RUNNING!
Once a full backup image is taken, you can use it to take differential backups...which will only backup the changes since the last full...to keep your image up to date.
Use Macrium Reflect to create an Emergency Boot CD.
In the case of a disaster on your boot drive, simply install a replacement C:drive then insert the Emergency Boot CD in the CD-ROM drive and boot the machine.
Macrium Reflect will run and let you write the image to the new C:drive. No Windows Activation mess...no reinstall of programs...just a simple re-imaging.
Reboot the PC and it will look as it did when you last ran Macrium.
I have tested this sequence and it is so bloody easy and sweet....I have no DR worries anymore.
There is a $40 registered version available that lets you run scheduled differentials but manual is ok with me.
If you want unattended automatic images to be done, spend the $40.
I have ~100 GB backed up with Carbonite. I haven’t had to do a full restore, but I have recovered individual files. The files were immediately restored.
Pretty much sums up my strategy.
Nice. Thanks. Sounds pretty slick. ;-)
So if your hard drive fails. You plug in a new drive in your machine but it has no OS???
How do you get your data from Carbonite and OS onto the new drive? Thanks.
What I am doing for work remote laptops now is backing up to a second hard drive via a removable hard drive enclosure. That way I can maintain all setting, software etc.
You reinstall the OS from separate media.
I use Acronis True Image to make full backup copies or complete clones of my C drive. I usually copy the C drive to a backup image on my D drive or to a dual layer DVD.
I keep ALL my data including emails on my D drive to protect against losing them if the C drive fails for some reason. My C drive only contains the operating system and my installed programs. I keep it as small as possible to allow me to do complete copies on a single DVD.
My main machine has 9 hard drives, 2 320 gig drives, 2 500 gig drives, and 5 1.5 TB drives. (I do a lot of Audio and Video recording and editing.
I am running WIN XP and I have no problems using Acronis with it.
I have also downloaded and tested the Release Candidate of WIN 7, but found it somewhat lacking for my own needs in that it doesn’t have Outlook Express.
The version of Acronis that I have doesn’t run under Windows 7 and I probably have to buy the latest version of Acronis if I migrate my computers to Win 7.
It is possible to make a clone of one’s C drive and restore it to a different computer using a motherboard and processor, but one must do a ‘repair’ install of windows to ensure that it runs correctly.
I have successfully done this in the past when upgrading my machine to a new computer. On the other hand, I couldn’t do this with my very latest build due to incompatibilities with some installed software.
My newest machine used an AMD 955 Black Edition X4 processor on a Gigabyte MA790FXT-UDP5 motherboard while my previous ‘main’ computer used an AMD Athlon X2 4600 processor.
Pre-Vista (XP and earlier) Windows has ‘ntbackup’ which will create a bkf file. I use it on my server to backup to tape (I realize this isn’t always an option).
For Vista, they have the backup and restore tools that copy data to an attached disk (USB or network). I backup my Vista machine to my 2003 server, and that backs up to tape. XP works the same as any other revision of Windows.
These are free options with your OS. If you want to buy something, have at it. Micro$oft threw us a small bone, anyway.
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