How do you backup your system?

PitchBlack · Sep 4, 2005

Quote from nononsense:

Spike,

Coming to think about it, I had this happening to me some while ago that one of my 2 CD writers at once refused to operate at high writing speed. I never discovered really why. Under linux both drives can write at top speed.

Nononsense,

i checked with an expert. The CD's are written at 48 speed. But i thought that writing from HD to HD would go much faster. I don't compress the image at all to keep speed high, but speed is to low i think. I write an image with the size of 7.5Gb in about 15 minues. This seems too slow to me.
Cd writer writes at 7200Kb/sec and HD to HD at 8500Kb/sec.

gnome · Sep 4, 2005

Quote from spike500:

"... I was not sure that cloning was good if ever i have to put back my complete system to the C drive...."

I have Acronis. I've imaged, I've cloned. Cloning is DEFINITELY better.... faster too. In fact, imaging SUCKS by comparison... to be used only when cloning isn't available... imo. AND, Casper XP 3.0 is even better at cloning than Acronis.

Bernard111 · Sep 4, 2005

Quote from gnome:

I have Acronis. I've imaged, I've cloned. Cloning is DEFINITELY better.... faster too. In fact, imaging SUCKS by comparison... to be used only when cloning isn't available... imo. AND, Casper XP 3.0 is even better at cloning than Acronis.

Why Casper XP 3.0 is better in your experience?

gnome · Sep 4, 2005

Quote from Bernard111:

Why Casper XP 3.0 is better in your experience?

It has a SmartClone feature where instead of copying the entire disk, it only copies files which have changed since the last cloning.... much faster.

There is a 30 day free trial available. Acronis has a 15 day free trial. If you need to image to removable media, Acronis is the one.

CoolTrader · Sep 4, 2005

Quote from gnome:

It has a SmartClone feature where instead of copying the entire disk, it only copies files which have changed since the last cloning.... much faster.

There is a 30 day free trial available. Acronis has a 15 day free trial. If you need to image to removable media, Acronis is the one.

gnome, could you explain the difference between image and clone? Does image use compression and could not replace the original drive without decompression?

gnome · Sep 4, 2005

Quote from CoolTrader:

gnome, could you explain the difference between image and clone? Does image use compression and could not replace the original drive without decompression?

In cloning, each sector is *supposed to be* copied byte by byte to be identical to the source drive.... for all sectors with data.

Imaging can involve compression or not. In either event, the software copies the source drive in the form of one large file onto the destination medium (compression occurs here, if selected)... that could be another partition on the source drive, another HD, or removable media. Then in the restoration, that file is played back (decompressed as necessary) just like it was a downloaded ".exe" file/program.

The problem I find with this is (a) it's slow, and (b) if any portion of the big file becomes corrupt, the entire restore is aborted. (Even in cloning, sometimes there's a glitch where a copied program doesn't work properly. You can just reinstall that program and everything else in the cloned HD works fine.... in the imaged format, everything in the image would be kaput.)

Bernard111 · Sep 18, 2005

One of the things that can happen, cloning HD to HD is this task can cause:
>>loader error 3>> at the Win2k startup.

This is the result after n backup/cloning; the System hive could become larger than 10.3Mb and blocks the boot literally.
The increase in size of the system hive can be seen in the growth of the system file %SystemRoot%\system32\config\system.

The temporary fix is to use the Win2k CD to make an Automatic Repair (option R) but this only save 1 Mb, so it shrinks the size to about 9Mb. So after a few further backups you will experience the same issue. An alternative seems to use the FIXBOOT command from the Recovery Console.

Instead, using the Veritas utility Vxscrub at http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/277301.htm
with option Usage-2
the System hive has been reduced from 10.3 Mb to about 4 on my PC.

nononsense · Sep 19, 2005

Quote from Bernard111:

One of the things that can happen, cloning HD to HD is this task can cause:
>>loader error 3>> at the Win2k startup.

This is the result after n backup/cloning; the System hive could become larger than 10.3Mb and blocks the boot literally.
The increase in size of the system hive can be seen in the growth of the system file %SystemRoot%\system32\config\system.

The temporary fix is to use the Win2k CD to make an Automatic Repair (option R) but this only save 1 Mb, so it shrinks the size to about 9Mb. So after a few further backups you will experience the same issue. An alternative seems to use the FIXBOOT command from the Recovery Console.

Instead, using the Veritas utility Vxscrub at http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/277301.htm
with option Usage-2
the System hive has been reduced from 10.3 Mb to about 4 on my PC.

This seems to me a bit hard to follow. Are you possibly talking about a multi-partition setup where the system partition is in fact distinct from your boot partition?
This may be peculiar to Veritas software doing something different from imaging. I wouldn't dare to use software like that. However, if you use disk imaging or cloning based on straight imaging, a working system at start should come out as a working system when finished, this making abstraction of the above multi-partition situation.
nono

Bernard111 · Sep 20, 2005

I always had only one partition on that PC; one of reason of that Loader error 3 is what I described, at least reading the rare posts on the net. Microsoft Knowledge base seems not to describe the issue.
When you have a PC that does not start at all with that black screen you are going to try everything. The simple fix using the Win2k boot Cd solved the issue only for a couple of backups since it shrinked the system hive only for less the 1Mb; instead the free Veritas utility did the job. I'm not a Veritas customer; Acronis Trueimage is my tool for backup.

AK100 · Sep 20, 2005

Don't know if it's been mentioned before in this thread (it's a long one) but THE best data backup service in my opinion is;

www.datadepositbox.com

Get up and running in about 3 mins, costs about $0.01 per MB so 500MB costs about $5 a month.

Runs in the background so everything is backed up as you go along, never any need to worry.

Seperate or external hard drives are all very well, but what about if they get nicked or there's a fire.......