vilasman

I would love to back up my main harddrive. I have plenty of external harddrive space.
A few weeks ago one of my computer's crashed. Reformatted the main harddrive and was ready to install my back-up but my computer, even though i booted it into safe mode with networking, it would not see the external drive.
Luckily I found a xp home disc, the computer origianally was xp media center
loaded xp home into what used to be the recovery partition loaded the backup software and then loaded the xp media center system backup file into the c: drive partition and I am off again.

Do I need to put in another internal drive big enough to back up my operating system and program files? I already store all my data files on external drives and I am planning to get externals to back up my externals.

Zealot

If you wish to backup a perfect replica of your system, similar to a backup of a mobile device with Sprite or SPB Backup, you will need both the HD space and the right software. Just saving the folders isn't enough, you need to save an "image" of your drive and system and that requires backp software.

I would recommend Symantec Ghost, but I am sure others have suggestions too.

DDR

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spud42

im with zealot. Ghost is good i used it a lot when i worked for Compaq/HP .

you can drive image to a hard disk or to optical disks...

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hyedipin

Yeah Ghost was a great tool when I had to restore my old computer.
I think this should be a standard application on every operating system, be able to clone the computer to a new one, but they want you to buy new licences so they don't encourage that.

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spud42

that wont actually work.. if the system is XP then trying to boot one drive image on a different computer with different hardware the new system wont boot. we could do drive images due to the fact that the systems were exactly the same hardware... drive size wasnt an issue but mb chipsets, processors, etc made it not work. with 98,2k etc you could as the os just went of and found new hardware , loaded the correct drivers and away you went....

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AKAJohnDoe

My Backup Strategy and some clarification

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vilasman

I read your strategy AKAjohndoe it makes sense...
Somebody expressed doubt about acronis, in a thread that was linked to yours...
Is acronis that dubious?
I have paragon, i use paragon, paragon has saved me twice

My thing about paragon is, you can't boot from it. You have to find away to get your system booted, in one case i installed xp home, then installed paragon and then restored my media center pc...

So my question is, if I am sitting with a virus infested wont act right, cant do anything past the initial boot screen... how am I supposed to get into paragon so I can do the recovery

AKAJohnDoe

You can burn a bootable CD with Paragon Drive Backup. That is how I initiate a restore.

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