Backup

[G B Leatherwood]

Dumb question of the day:
I want to back up my entire system on to a CDRW disk, and
I want to be able to use it if (shudder!) my hard drive
fails and I have to start all over.
How do I do this? Go back to the MS/DOS command "copy c:m"
Is there a simpler way with XP? I tried looking in "Help"
but didn't find the answer.
Thanks.

[Tom Porterfield]

You're best bet is to get more robust tools. Something that will image
the entire partition or drive and then restore that image should that be
necessary. Something like Image from TeraByte Unlimited -
http://www.bootitng.com/imagew.html (Best Deal). Or Drive Image from
PowerQuest - http://www.powerquest.com/driveimage/. Or Ghost from
Symantec - http://www.ghost.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/.

All of these products allow you to create an image to CD-RW, some even
allow making that CD-RW disk bootable so that the restore process would
simply be booting the PC from the CD disk and restoring.

--
Tom Porterfield
Windows XP / Smart Display MVP
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/tp.porterfield/support

Please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup only.


G B Leatherwood wrote:
> Dumb question of the day:
> I want to back up my entire system on to a CDRW disk, and
> I want to be able to use it if (shudder!) my hard drive
> fails and I have to start all over.
> How do I do this? Go back to the MS/DOS command "copy c:m"
> Is there a simpler way with XP? I tried looking in "Help"
> but didn't find the answer.
> Thanks.

[Mike Donnelly]

"G B Leatherwood" > wrote in
:

> Dumb question of the day:
> I want to back up my entire system on to a CDRW disk, and
> I want to be able to use it if (shudder!) my hard drive
> fails and I have to start all over.
> How do I do this? Go back to the MS/DOS command "copy c:m"
> Is there a simpler way with XP? I tried looking in "Help"
> but didn't find the answer.
> Thanks.
>
>

CD-RW disks are not a very reliable medium to use for backup.
They are supposedly a bit risky. CD-R is better, but YMMV.

It gets worse. Win XP Pro has a backup program called
NTbackup. XP Home installation leaves it on the system CD.
Even if you were to copy NTbackup from your system disk, you
can't use it to backup to a CD. so if you intend to put the
backup files on a CD, forget that approach. Microsoft won't
allow it.

The program BackUp My PC from Stomp, Inc. is often mentioned
as a wonderful program. I wouldn't know, since I couldn't get
it to work. It is very fussy about the quality of blank CD's
you are using. Unfortunately, Stomp is not brave enough to
provide a list of good ones and bad ones. The Stomp website
even says that CD's that work with its other products, may not
work for Backup.

It gets worse. Even if you find a CD that will satisy the
Backup program, you can't use it to back up Windows XP Home
with SP1. Microsoft chose not to support Automated System
Recovery (ASR). The official instructions in the Stomp manual
for Backup tell you to install XP from your system CD, then
install all the updates from Microsoft. Then you can install
all your applications.

Took me about two weeks to recover from a hard drive crash. Am
I bitter? Naaah

There are other approaches using Ghost or Zip, but I can't
offer any advice there. I guess it gets down to what you are
trying to back up and how much of the system needs to be
operational to accomplish that: replacing one corrupted file,
or loading up a new hard drive.

I look forward you getting some useful advice, because it will
help me too. Best of luck.

..flame shield on

--
Mike Donnelly