What's a great backup and restore utility for home use?

easymon1 said:
Dry Run
What's a good way to go through a hard disk disaster recovery Dry Run without putting your dealio at risk?[/QUOTE

by restoring your image to a virtual machine through free VMware or virtualbox. I can't recall for myself where a image failed to restore so for educational purposes only.
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mgookin said:
That's a very legitimate question. And to be honest, I've never heard of one work and have ony heard of them not being successful. Maybe only people who experience failures are vocal about it, or maybe none of them work.

Anyone ever seen one work successfully?
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I've done it enough that sometimes I do it ghetto myself... Remember the old-school record players?? There is a disk/platter/record that spins, an arm that reads/writes and a little printed circuit board (PCB) that controls the whole fiasco.

I start by swapping the printed circuit boards and holding my breath - take the OLD PCB and put it on a known-good drive. (exact firmware, buy used, eBay) If the PCB fails on the known good drive you are LUCKY... put the good PCB on the "bad drive" and it'll most probably work.

If the PCB works on the "known good" drive then pardon my french but you are F'd... open up the case (carefully) and put the platters from the bad drive into the "known good" case/drive... fire it up and pray...

Sending it out is pretty much a black & white process - either they get your data or it's too far gone... For the cost of data recovery on a drive you can have 10TB backed up in a RAID5 or RAID6 DROBO (Do you know they sell 6TB drives these days??)...

Do not EVER put yourself in a position to need to send out a drive - it'll take MONTHS, cost an arm and a leg and won't always work... So that's that...

EDIT: To follow up - you then use a command line and block-for-block copy the disk over to a completely good/new/known good drive/raid array (something redundant) and then try to recover/restore once you can make an archive/master copy and a "working" copy... Don't just swap stuff over and try to fire up Windows and work with it...

EDIT #2: For reference... I pay more attention to dirt/dust when I rebuild the fuel injectors on my race car than I do when I swap over platters on a HDD... but to get comfortable with the process I bought a lot of 20x 40GB HDD's on eBay and destroyed just about all of them teaching myself - don't just assume you can do it.
 
easymon1 said:
What's the good bad and ugly on using the product included in Windows 7 Home Premium to Image and Back up my HD? - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/back-up-programs-system-settings-files#1TC=windows-7
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Macrium Reflect is free and gets 5/5 reviews from users. You might try both and see if one is better than the other.

I have Acronis. It's not free, but I've never had a "failure to restore" in 10 years of use. You can even get free versions of Acronis for certain WD and Seagate drives.
 
Scataphagos said:
Macrium Reflect is free and gets 5/5 reviews from users. You might try both and see if one is better than the other.

I have Acronis. It's not free, but I've never had a "failure to restore" in 10 years of use. You can even get free versions of Acronis for certain WD and Seagate drives.
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Newest version of ACRONIS supports also SSD.
Maybe important, maybe not.
 
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