How do you backup your system?

Quote from hcour:
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?
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Yes that is correct. The advantage of cloning has over imaging is that with cloning you dont need to do a restore step because you have a perfect copy of the original drive already sitting on the clone drive. If your system is configured correctly you should be able to change you BIOS boot order and immediately boot into the clone drive. I don't know if your situation requires that kind of speed versus having to take the time to restore the backup image. Luckily I have never had to do a full image restore (knock on wood) so for me the speed isnt as crucial because I dont plan on having to do it often and I have other systems I can use if one goes down.
Quote from hcour:
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?
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Yes, exactly.
Quote from hcour:
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?
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Yep, that is the advantage, you can store multiple images (because of the compression) in the same space that a single clone drive would require.

Having several backups is definitely a good idea in case you don't notice that you permanently deleted an important file for a week or two. Also you dont have to do a full image restore, you can mount the backup image as a drive letter and then browse and restore select files if you need to. Its very nice.
 
OK, thanks for the info on the diff between imaging and cloning, guys.

There are some issues w/cloning, as I understand it, not sure if they've been brought up in this discussion yet. This is from John Will, a knowledgable member on the Tech Support Guy forum:

The reason they mention removing the cloned drive is a little problem that can occur if you clone to a drive that's formatted and assigned a drive letter. The image you're cloning from has the destination drive assigned a different drive letter than the system boot letter. When you boot from the clone in that instance, you'll end up in a login loop when it gets confused about what the drive letter is.

A simple fix for this is to boot from an MS-DOS floppy and type FDISK /MBR to remove the signature bytes from the master boot record.
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And:
The problem isn't in leaving it connected, it's really if the disk has a drive letter assigned BEFORE the clone operation. For instance, you have a drive with data on it, and you're going to overwrite it to clone your system. Apparently, the clone operation doesn't touch the MBR, which kinda' makes sense since the partition table is in the same sector. So, the disk signature that 2K/XP writes when you assign a drive letter is still there. When you go to boot the cloned copy, XP login thinks it's running on drive E: for instance, and it's really on drive C:. That's when the loop occurs. This really threw me for a loop the first time, but now I have it under control.

FWIW, I've had lots of cloned disks sitting in a machine, and even accessed them after the fact and extracted data from them. There's no issue that I'm aware of doing that, and it's never been a problem for me.
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Harold
 
I've never had any issues with cloning and Windows assigning a drive letter. Maybe it's because I have all my HDs set to Cable Select (CS) ??

In any event, Windows always indicates the slave HD as "D:", and when I put it in the primary position, Windows indicates it as "C:" I swap them around freely, and there's never been a question or problem. (And, I don't necessarily "remove HD after cloning" as a requirement.)
 
Too late now (sorry) but Woot had a really good deal on 250GB WD refurb drives today, $50 + $5 ship. That's a good price to pick up a couple of spare drives for storing backups without dealing with rebates. Maybe they will have them again.

http://www.woot.com/
 
I just bought a new hd, made a clone using Acronis and noticed m$ softs need to be activated. I really don't want to go thru this each and every time I clone. Is there a way around this? Or do I just not clone excel?

tia,

nt
 
Quote from ntfs:

I just bought a new hd, made a clone using Acronis and noticed m$ softs need to be activated. I really don't want to go thru this each and every time I clone. Is there a way around this? Or do I just not clone excel?

tia,

nt
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Go LINUX
 
Quote from ntfs:
nononsense,
You said Go LINUX
Are you saying use Knoppix to copy the hd or forget using m$ and use open office?
nt
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Forget using m$. That'd be my suggestion. btw, OpenOffice is really nice with v2.0
 
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