How do you backup your system?

Thanks for the link to Ghost 10.0 hcour - looks like Ghost has changed a lot since the last time I used (hated those dos-level boot diskettes with finicky NIC drivers)

Getting a little off-topic here but did anyone see the article about that woman who almost lost the only copy of her master's thesis she had because it was on a usb drive in her purse which was stolen?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/21/AR2005122102311.html

I think they should deny her the master's degree just for the stupidity of that act alone.
 
Quote from winter:

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I think they should deny her the master's degree just for the stupidity of that act alone.
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..or perhaps they should also fire her advisor since they are supposed to be keeping copies of drafts for review and progress ..... if her advisor cant use a computer and didn't keep any drafts then they should be the first one to go ......
 
Quote from prt_systems:

..or perhaps they should also fire her advisor since they are supposed to be keeping copies of drafts for review and progress ..... if her advisor cant use a computer and didn't keep any drafts then they should be the first one to go ......
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Sheesh guys, maybe they're not computer geeks like us and think that nothing ever could go wrong.... could go wrong...... could go wrong.... could go wrong....
 
Quote from gnome:

Sheesh guys, maybe they're not computer geeks like us and think that nothing ever could go wrong.... could go wrong...... could go wrong.... could go wrong....
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I dunno, the article said that another student had already had a similar experience so the idea of losing it wasnt unknown to her:

Another student, Neil Doldo, told her to back up the data: He had lost his jump drive with his almost-finished thesis, spent three sickening days retracing his steps searching for it, until finally his dogs Zeus and Mela tired of it and left it on the floor near the dog bed.
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Not like it takes a lot of effort to place a copy of it on the laptop she is working on either.

Maybe she did have previous (earlier) versions saved elsewhere and they left that out of article to make it sound more exciting. Hard to believe that the single copy on the USB drive was the only version anywhere.
 
Quote from hcour:

Great thread. Ya'll might want to check out Norton Ghost 10.0. I've just been reading a review in CPU magazine and they give it 4.75 stars out of 5. The "GoBack" feature sounds very interesting. Here's the article:

http://www.computerpoweruser.com/ed...01a.asp&guid=6398E331E883426A8C5A740A3406ECCA

Harold
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I initially worked with Ghost, but when Acronis started as first one with a windows version is changed to Acronis.
Ghost 10.0 is similar to Acronis; only more expensive.
 
Quote from spike500:

I initially worked with Ghost, but when Acronis started as first one with a windows version is changed to Acronis.
Ghost 10.0 is similar to Acronis; only more expensive.
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Acronis and ghost both work ..... of course on Linux backup tools are free and packaged with the distributions (Rsync etc) which also include various forms of raid support. Also, defragmentation is basically a non-issue in the ext2 and ext3 filesystems (unlike NTFS and other $soft filesystems).
 
I just got Acronis True Image and would like to clone my drive. But it says I have to remove the old drive after I clone it. Wha's up wi dat? I have a SATA and an IDE drive. I want to clone my SATA to my IDE and leave them both in the system. I have an ASUS mb, as long as I have my bios set to boot from the SATA, then this shouldn't be problem, should it? I don't want my computer to explode or anything.:)

Thanks,
Harold
 
Quote from hcour:

I just got Acronis True Image and would like to clone my drive. But it says I have to remove the old drive after I clone it. Wha's up wi dat? I have a SATA and an IDE drive. I want to clone my SATA to my IDE and leave them both in the system. I have an ASUS mb, as long as I have my bios set to boot from the SATA, then this shouldn't be problem, should it? I don't want my computer to explode or anything.:)
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It shouldnt be a problem, its for people that dont understand drive booting issues as long you have everything under control it will be fine.

I would remove the drive letter for the IDE drive from the disk manager just to make sure I never got confused about which drive I was working on and wrote a file to the wrong drive but thats strictly a matter of personal preference.

BTW, why did you want to clone the drive rather than taking an image backup of the SATA drive? I bet with compression you can fit two image backups on the IDE drive (assuming they are equal size).
 
winter,

Thanks for bringing up imaging. I looked into it a bit and maybe you're right, that might be a better way to go, but I'm unclear exactly what imaging actually is. If I backup the whole drive and then restore that, it's basically like reverting to that previous backup point, correct?

Acronis creates a bootable cd which boots right into their program, which is sweet. So say some program or virus or whatever completely screws up Windows, then I would boot into the Acronis cd and choose to restore the whole partition, right? And this would restore it just like it was at the backup point before things went bad. Do I understand it correctly?

This would be nice, because I could have several different images on the backup disk, like maybe every few days, so I could revert to yesterday, or 3 days ago, or a wk ago, right?

Thanks much,
Harold
 
Quote from hcour:

winter,

Thanks for bringing up imaging. I looked into it a bit and maybe you're right, that might be a better way to go, but I'm unclear exactly what imaging actually is. If I backup the whole drive and then restore that, it's basically like reverting to that previous backup point, correct?

Acronis creates a bootable cd which boots right into their program, which is sweet. So say some program or virus or whatever completely screws up Windows, then I would boot into the Acronis cd and choose to restore the whole partition, right? And this would restore it just like it was at the backup point before things went bad. Do I understand it correctly?

This would be nice, because I could have several different images on the backup disk, like maybe every few days, so I could revert to yesterday, or 3 days ago, or a wk ago, right?

Thanks much,
Harold
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When imaging, the software converts all of the data into one big file (like a compressed downlowd, ".exe" file). When you restore the image, it's virtually like opening and installing a program you donwloaded.

I use Acronis for cloning backups to HDs. The potential problems with "imaging to removable media", are the cost, speed, and reliability. I've imaged and cloned. I prefer cloning at least 10:1.

In my view the priority and quailty rank of backups would be, Windows System Restore (least), Imaging, and HD cloning (best).
 
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