In message , R.Wieser
writes:
John,

Question #1

... rather than the boot-from-CD part that I prefer ...

I also would prefer to make my backup when the OS I'm going to backup isn't
running. Call me daft, but I do not really trust "shadow" copies. Just one
file out of sync and you're the pisang.

Me too.

For the _restore_ from image, you boot from the CD you make

In my case I would probably use an USB stick, as more-and-more 'puters have
USB support, but do not always have a CD/DVD drive.

(My XP one didn't - netbook - but could boot from a USB one. In fact
it's almost the only time I _use_ the [USB] optical drive.)

And to be honest, that is where my idea of pre-configuring came from: Where
you can't store/change user configuration data on a CD, it should be no
problem for an USB stick.

... on the other hand, CDs cannot easily be altered, which is a big pre when
dealing with infected computers.

And - in much the same way you don't trust backing up a running system -
I like to have my image/restore software on a CD.

It can of course include your D: partition too, though I would back that
up differently.

Same here, and its something I'm already doing: just copying (with some
filtering and a twist) the files to an external USB drive.

Me too. I use SyncToy which speeds the process considerably after the
first time (by only copying what's new or has changed), but basically
it's just a copy. (I cycle round two or three such.)

My best-case scenario would be to use the same disk to boot and run the
backup/restore program from, and store the backup of the OS partition on.

That certainly ought to be possible; Macrium 5's boot CD is 2xx MB. The
images it makes are a single file.

I don't think this can be totally automated (you have to point it at
_which_ image you want to restore, for a start)

Not quite. It could show the backupped images in order of the oldest
first, and pre-select it. :-)

Hmm. Not sure if it can be configured to do that, though maybe it can.
Paul knows more about Macrium (and everything else!) than I do. (He's
just even worse than I am in wanting to give a _complete_ answer, so his
answers are sometimes overwhelming. To me anyway.)

... but it's pretty trivial.

It always is... up until the moment you're in a it-should-be-running-NOW
stressfull situation, and you try to remember what the heck the program is
actually asking you. :-(

You shouldn't be panicking when you're about to start restoring an image
- not that it matters if you get it wrong as you can always start again,
just that it takes time to restore an image. It really isn't difficult
to understand what you're doing - just choosing which image to restore
from; if you let it name the images, it'll have used the date they were
made as the name, so that choice isn't hard.

Question #2:

Obviously, _no_ system is going to run without loading an OS first.

Obviously, which is why I asked. What does it need to be able to do a
restore ?

Mind you, even a DOS program could restore backuppped sectors to a
partition - regardless of filesystem. Mostly the hard part is, at backup
time, to determine which sectors need, and which do not need to be placed in
the backup.

Macrium doesn't ask you about sectors, just partitions. (Its default
setting is only to image the parts of the partition that are occupied,
i. e. the image is smaller than the partitions you select, but it
restores them to the size they were.) And it defaults to selecting all
partitions, so it includes any you need to reconstruct a drive; I just
deselect my D: drive and, if it has selected it, my backup drive (which
you obviously _don't_ want to include).
[]
Thanks for the reply and macrium usage instructions.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser


You're welcome. I hope I've been correct in what I've said.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

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