Best way to back up an entire disk?

April 23, 2004 8:45 PM from

Heya I figured this was as good a place to ask as any.

I got my tax refund and was FINALLY able to get a new drive to replace my 14 gig C drive. >

It should be here in a few days. http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-144-122&depa=0

Anyway I have XP Home and I really want to be able to back up as much of the disk as possible , then reinstall XP Home to the new disk and restore an image. I''ve never tried to do this before. I have Acronis TrueImage http://www.acronis.com/products/trueimage/ and a DVD burner, I have Nero 6 too but I don''t see it having any backup tools. Also there''s a Windows migration wizard but I don''t think it will migrate things like my WB skins!

Anyway how would you image/restore a whole disk?

TIA

7,412 views 22 replies

Reply #1 April 23, 2004 8:48 PM from

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Drive Image 7....worth the money as it functions in the OS you are imaging...no needing to boot to Dos...

Reply #2 April 23, 2004 8:50 PM from

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Although I haven't used it personally, but Norton Ghost is a popular program for making exact image backups of disks.

http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/

Curtains - Customize Windows with additional styles

Reply #3 April 23, 2004 8:51 PM from

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WD HDD's come with software that will let you transfer the entire contents of one drive to a partition on the new drive

That's one way. There's also Norton's Ghost, which I've never used, but my dad-inlaw, who refurbishes computers, swears by it.

[Message Edited]

Reply #4 April 23, 2004 8:55 PM from

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/me notices bad things happen with the =>''<= when you edit a message

I use Drive Image 2002 (older version) to back up my harddrive

Reply #5 April 23, 2004 9:15 PM from

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I doubt it's a legal DL...DI7 cost me more than that...

Reply #6 April 23, 2004 9:16 PM from

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I'll have to find my receipt....but I think it was around 50 US or there abouts

Reply #7 April 23, 2004 9:18 PM from

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69.95 USD

Reply #8 April 23, 2004 9:18 PM from

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http://www.powerquest.com/driveimage/ Manufacturer's site where the proggie costs $69.95

Concerns about the link you got include:

*no support page
* no ability to pay with a credit card...only paypal???
* no email addy on display
* no link to the manufacturer's website
* no details or guarrantees

Reply #9 April 23, 2004 9:20 PM from

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DI7 is a 433meg download, btw...

Reply #10 April 23, 2004 9:37 PM from

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ROFL. 433? Thanks folks. I pretty much knew it was bogus anyway....that whole "too good to be true" thing.

Umm could someone possibly edit my post to remove the link to that site, so no other suckers visit that mess?

Reply #11 April 23, 2004 10:50 PM from

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Done, Stockholm...

Reply #12 April 24, 2004 4:31 AM from

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Drive Image 7. Works flawlessly. I have mine set to do weekly backups automatically. I also do a manual backup monthly. Of course I do have 320Gb of HD space to do it on. But how much is your data worth to you? I have an 80Gb as main, 80Gb for monthly backups and 160Gb for weekly backups. The 80Gb also has a daily backup of My Documents using SyncBack.

I lost all my data once - never again!

Reply #13 April 24, 2004 4:53 PM from

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But how much is your data worth to you?

LOTS.

I don't even want to THINK about losing the contents of any of my drives. And I only gave System Restore about 500 megs. Not that it really backs up data anyway does it?

Well for some lovely reason TrueImage won't even work anymore so I'll be heading to the Drive Image store later.

Reply #14 April 24, 2004 7:27 PM from

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I have been experimenting with drive backup for some time. I wish I had the money back that was wasted on stuff that didn''t work, or work as advertised.
Anyway, the best solution that I came up with is:
Drive Image 7 and Acronis TrueImage. Both work very well, but Acronis is a little faster.
I got a really good deal on a Maxtor 120 GB drive, so I "sacrificed" a nearly new 60 GB drive to just store images on. I use maximum compression so I can get several images on one drive. Much more dependable than cdr(w)''s or dvdr(w)''s. I have tried both. None of that disc-swapping stuff.(Using a hard drive) Especially if you are restoring an image to a drive that is a different size than the original.

Reply #15 April 24, 2004 8:45 PM from

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Especially if you are restoring an image to a drive that is a different size than the original.

Oh really, does that cause problems with backups on DVDR? I will be restoring to a drive that's a very different size.

ACK I didn't know this was so complicated.

[Message Edited]

Reply #16 April 24, 2004 8:48 PM from

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You can only restore an image to a partition the same size or larger than the original.

Reply #17 April 24, 2004 10:02 PM from

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Acronis will let you restore to a different size drive, (haven't tried that with DI) but you have to switch discs, a lot.
Example, I restored about 7 gb of data imaged from a 20 gb drive to a 60 gb drive and had to switch discs at least a hundred times. No joke! I swore I would never go through that again. Hence the hard drive to store images.

Reply #18 April 24, 2004 11:35 PM from

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Oh, ok. I believe you.

I had to restore a My Documents folder that spanned across multiple disks and it took -hours- of swapping disks to do it. Well I do have another drive in the PC, might do it that way.

Thanks a bunch everyone, btw.

Reply #19 April 29, 2004 10:36 PM from

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I finally installed the drive and restored a TrueImage backup from a slave drive. I ended up going with Acronis for the incremental backup feature. I cannot believe how easy that was.

Usually installing a new drive meant days of getting everything re-installed and reconfigured.
Now that I'm back up I was wondering, what kind of backup schedules do you guys use? I was thinking once a week full backup, daily incremental?

Reply #20 April 30, 2004 5:45 AM from

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I don't do incremental backups, per se. I keep a folder on my desktop called Data Backup where I keep all the important stuff that I don't want to lose. WB skins, install files, apps, photos, etc. I update it every few days and then just burn that to a DVD-RW about once every two weeks. I can then erase the DVD's past 2 backups. I currently have over 3.5 GB that I save.

Reply #21 April 30, 2004 7:49 PM from

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I also use TrueImage7.0.611. Works very nice, I do an image before installing a new program. All of my documents, pictures, music, etc. are on a seperate drive. Stardock is installed on a different drive as well.

I always do a full image (in CD size segments) to a file with todays date and delete older ones. I then burn those segments to a DVD if I want to, 6 fit on a DVD.

I tried incremental backups once, but if you delete temp files and the like, tends to increase the size of the incremental.

Reply #22 May 1, 2004 5:22 PM from

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best way to back up a drive is to move the whole thing on to another drive.

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