Backing up a hard drive, What to use?

[Dave N.]

Hey Folks, Hope everyone here had a good Christmas and New year.

I wanted to get opinions on software to use to back up a hard drive so that I can back up Windows XP and all on it.

Just had a hard drive go out in my Daughters PC and had to install a new HD and re-install Windows XP and her other software she uses, what a pain

I heard Norton Ghost is supposed to be good but was wondering what other software is good too. Any freeware out there to do this?

Thanks

Dave.

[defaced]

I try to avoid Norton products because the stuff I have used was very bloated and slow. I have used Active software for other things, and would recommend checking out their disk image software:
http://www.disk-image.net/

It should let you demo it for a couple weeks to a month to see how you like it.

[Don Moose]

There's a free program called Clonezilla that I have used with some success. You have to be equipped to burn a CD from a .iso image file, but there are other free tools that will do that.

Clonezilla will save and restore disk image files, though. Not individual files/directories. I used it to move an XP installation from a 20GB HDD to a 100GB one. Had to make a few tries to get a 100GB partition on the target drive, but I did get it figured out.

Have you poked around SourceForge? You do have to specify that you are looking for Windows or XP stuff, but it's free and most of it (that I have tried) is pretty good.

[Dave N.]

Hey Fellas, thanks for that info, I'll check those programs out and see what works.

After having to completely replace a hard drive and lost data from the old bad one it taught me a lesson. Lost some good info I had been saving for years ranging from some good amp schems to some killer pics of guitars that I have seen and saved on the net, made a screen saver program with those cool guitar pics too...

Cheers



Dave

[R.G.]

If you think about it a little bit, it is 100% certain that if you keep using computers, one day your hard file will die. At that point, you will with almost 100% certainty buy a new hard file, if not a whole new computer.

Since you will eventually have to buy a new disk, why not buy it before your current drive dies? It's not that costly. Right now you can get 1Tb (that's 1000Gb) for $100. I just did that. With that much space available, just mirror your working hard drive to the back up drive at whatever intervals you could stand to lose - once a day, once a week, once a month, whatever.

This *completely* ends the issue of losing it all unless your house burns, floods or is vaporized in a nuclear attack. And it's fast. And it's automatic.

And you can look for special deals on disks instead of having to buy one RIGHT NOW.

Just a thought...

[dai h.]

definitely, data loss, data corruption is bad bad news. Talk about an ill feeling. Had multiple hard drive failure one time and since then I try to back data up semi-religiously. Like RG says, a massive 1TB disk is very affordable and come down a lot in price. Bought one (Seagate 3--somethingsomething--AS) for about 80 bucks(incl.COD and shipping). Plus an Antec external drive case for about 20. Using hard disks for backup seemed to be the most practical (cost vs. storage space, speed compared to say writing a DVD, etc., speed of accessing data). Seem cheap enough that you could even set one aside with your backup data. Also, my understanding is it's best to have three copies total. Incl. myself I've seen at least several instances of data loss here(at ampage)--guitar, amp stuff, schematics, etc. that had been accumulated over the years, etc., so... watch out!

[pineapple49]

buy another hard drive the same size and set up R.A.I.D it will clone the hardrive and all the files . simple..

[Bill Moore]

I use Casper.

When I had this old computer built, the builder installed a copy of Casper with all the other stuff. It also had a removeable drive bay, and 2 extra drives. I backed up daily to one drive, and used Casper with the other, monthly, to clone the complete C drive. This summer the computer started locking up, my tech guy, (old high school friend), said the drive is dying. I told him about Casper, and he was able to clone the C drive to a new drive before it completely quit. I have a small business, and all my information, and customers information is intact. When I put the old machine back on line, Casper came out with ver. 5.0, which I bought. The first time you use it, it may take more than an hour to copy your drive, but the monthly backup only copies the new info, and takes less than 15 min. I feel like I was lucky to have the program installed, (my tech guy now has Casper on his machine).

[Steve Conner]

There is one important Gotcha with RAID. (RAID level 1, to be pedantic.) The "backup" drive is online all the time, which means that the contents of the two drives are kept identical.

So, it protects you against failure of one of the drives. But if you delete a bunch of important stuff by mistake, or your computer gets a virus, your goof is instantly duplicated onto the other drive.

This is why we call it a mirror and not a backup. A real backup would let you retrieve a copy of your files from 3 days ago before the virus hit, or whatever you needed.

Mirroring and backups both have their places in enterprise IT, but for the home, a regular backup is usually enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

[insp166]

Does anybody partition their big hard drives into 4 smaller ones?
I was taught you have one partition with you operating system on it
And the rest for your files.

That way you can replace or fix the operating system without losing the rest of you stuff

[R.G.]

Does anybody partition their big hard drives into 4 smaller ones?
I was taught you have one partition with you operating system on it
And the rest for your files.

That way you can replace or fix the operating system without losing the rest of you stuff

Close, but no cigar.
Use two or more real, no fooling hard drives. Hard drives are so cheap today that you can easily whip in a 20GB drive just for the exclusive use of your operating system and paging space. It may be hard to find one that small.

You then buy TWO data disks. One is your everyday disk. The other is your backup, which you store images of your everyday disk in at intervals that you can accept losses. You leave your back up disk off line when it's not backing up. Putting the back up on a USB exterior drive is smart, so it can be both powered down and put in a safe place between backups.

NEVER put data on your OS disk, or anything else which cannot be restored from program CD/DVDs.

[Steve Conner]

What R.G. said. I've always set up my computers this way, unless they were laptops with no room for a second disk. Having two physical disks speeds up audio editing too: you put your temp files on the OS drive and your audio on the other drive, so the data just spools between the two drives instead of thrashing the heads around. Of course in these days when everyone has 2GB of RAM, that probably doesn't matter any more...

The only gotcha is that Windows insists in keeping stuff in C:\Documents and Settings\*your user name*\ and that is on your OS drive. I've never figured out how to move it. This tutorial shows how to move your "My Documents":

http://thundercloud.net/information-.../my-documents/

but it would be neat to move the whole Documents And Settings tree, the way you can move /home in Unix.

I recently discovered a cool program called FreeFileSync. It's not technically a backup program at all, rather a synchronisation one, but it really fits my way of working. I just plug in the external USB drive after doing any important work, and run FreeFileSync to copy over any changed or updated files.

The reason why I say it's not a backup program is that if you modify a file, it will overwrite the old file with the new one. Most good backup software keeps your old versions, so if you mess up a file and back up the SNAFU'd version, you can retrieve a previous good version. However, at least FreeFileSync lets you preview what it's going to do before it does it.

[R.G.]

The only gotcha is that Windows insists in keeping stuff in C:\Documents and Settings\*your user name*\ and that is on your OS drive. I've never figured out how to move it...
I recently discovered a cool program called FreeFileSync. It's not technically a backup program at all, rather a synchronisation one, but it really fits my way of working. I just plug in the external USB drive after doing any important work, and run FreeFileSync to copy over any changed or updated files.

Imagine a file utility that checks the contents of C:\Documents and Settings\*.* every so often and whenever it's different, it updates a copy on another drive, with a different name. That way the copy is almost always exactly the same as the stuff on C:.

And as we all know, almost always is almost always as good as always.

[defaced]

RAID 1. I'm waiting for Seagate to get their stuff straight, but I'm thinking two 1.4TB drives in RAID 1 for storage and and my 35GB Western Digital Raptor for system are the way to go. With My Documents being stored on the storage drive, the only personal files that wouldn't be mirrored would be the contents of my desktop. That's something I can live with.

[dai h.]

possible issue is with some windoze RAID configurations, file writes can be excruciatingly slow, so a regular drive(or external) might be less of a PITA (not making two copies at the same time but might be much faster overall).