Not strictly DIY, though I suppose I will be doing it myself! Anyway I've bought a large capacity external hard drive mainly as a store place for photos, but it would also be a good place to have a back up for the main drive.
What is recommended for this ? - I've heard the term 'mirror' before but am not sure what that mens in this context.
The drive has a SATA capability, as well as USB, so once that is fitted, it should be quite quick in loading.
Thanks
Rob
Something along the lines of Drive Image. I use an old version but 7 was the last I know of. I take an image to a 2nd drive once a month and use Karen's Replicator any time I make any changes to important files, like Quicken for example.
Restoring a total main disc loss, image + latest Karen files take me about 3 hours back to the point of failure. I'm so confident in the way this system works, that I have on occasions, used it to sort out quite minor program screw-ups.
Andy
I've used products from
The software was very easy to understand and I have used it a couple of times now to make drive images of old laptops with small slow (4200rpm) drives to new bigger faster (7200rpm) drives. A nice performance bost.
This is the most compprehensive form of backup as it is a complete image of the drive.
Hope that helps. Make sure you have a USB2 port on your computer (it sounds like you have a sata drive in an external case with a USB2 port and possibly a sata port) otherwise it will take a very log time.
I just copy the "docs and settings" folder to a dvrw disc every month but the ntuser.dat file can't be accessed as it's always in use. This contains your profile, so I guess it's a pretty important file. There's a handy little utility called Erunt which copies the registry on startup and keeps copies for 30 days.
Acronis is good and easy, far better than Norton Ghost which promised things that never happened when I attempted to use it.
Have heard "odd" thing about Acronis, though can't vouch for it personally.
Norton Ghost is good if you can get hold of version 8 or earlier. Norton , true to form, took a halfway decent product and upwardly fornicated it big time.
VH.
Don't rely on an external HD for backup. It is bound to fail during backup and you will lose the data and the backup (Murphy's law). You need at least two.
Acronis TrueImage is very good and easy to use. You get a complete partition snapshot which can be restored from a bootable CD, or you can restore individual files. You can also schedule full or incremental backups.
Acronis, Paragon and Norton ( Ghost ) are all examples of disk 'imagers' - and they all do pretty much the same thing..which is to archive a drive ( or a partition ) into a single file which can be used to restore the recorded drive/partition in whole or part at a later date.
The term 'mirror' refers to a RAID setup, whereby more than one drive is installed - one of which is maintained as an exact copy of the other.
Acronis came top in a recent review of such products in PCPro magazine, which is about as good a recommendation as you'll need - check out magazine cover disks for earlier versions of such programs ( I'm more than happy with Paragon's DriveBackup 2004.
Regards,
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