A Windows XP help forum. PCbanter

If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Go Back   Home » PCbanter forum » Microsoft Windows XP » General XP issues or comments
Site Map Home Register Authors List Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read Web Partners

O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)



 
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #46  
Old May 11th 18, 05:28 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)

Mark Twain wrote:
I wanted to run something by you and see if
you think theres's any problem with it or if
it's OK. This is in the near future,..

Instead of removing the 8500 HD and installing
the WD to clone the new HD. I want to clone the
new HD with the 8500 O/S and then make a Mrimg
folder and create a mrimg for it after cloning.

Then when I do my monthly Mrimgs I do Mrimgs for
both the WD and for the new external back-up and
also do the 780 mrimgs with its own dedicated
external HD.

What do you think?

Robert


Normally, you're backing up data that has changed.

The backup drives should hold (mainly) backups.

Now, if your internal drive was running out of room,
and you needed to add a second hard drive inside the
machine, then you might want to include that in your
backup set to the external drive.

I can't tell from your description, whether you're
backing up a backup drive (to make a second copy) or
what you're up to. If you wanted "redundancy", you
can copy a freshly made MRIMG on one external drive,
to a second external drive, as a form of insurance.

Macrium (Copy)

Internal ------- External Drive #1 ---- External Drive #2

But generally, any "multiplication" of backups is a
mistake. I've tried this before, and it rapidly
gets out of hand. (For example, I've had backups stored
on my internal drive, which during emergency data recovery
operations, have cost me time handling them.) It's
best to make a fresh backup from whatever you consider
the "source" of the data, any time you want to store
on an external, and try to avoid if possible, making
backups of backups. Because it's harder to get
rid of those doubly-backed up things later.

From experience, I can tell you that if you aren't
careful with how you handle generations of backups,
on Tuesday you buy a 1TB drive, on Wednesday you
buy a 2TB drive, on Thursday you buy a 4TB drive,
on Friday you buy a 8TB drive. And you begin to
realize "hey, this looks like addiction" :-)
So if you notice you're constantly running
out of room, there's a good chance you've been
making backups of backups. It balloons rapidly
when you do that. It's taken me days of data
transfers, to clean those sorts of messes up.
(I stopped at 4TB.)

It's OK to, say, alternate drives from week
to week.
Macrium
Week1 -------- External Drive #1
Week2 -------- External Drive #2
Week3 -------- External Drive #1
Week4 -------- External Drive #2

What that pattern does, is if Drive #1 fails or
is flaky and you didn't notice, maybe the internal
drive fails one day, you reach for Drive #1 and it's
bad too. In such a case, Drive #2 has backups
that might be a little older or a little newer.

The only reason to rotate more drives than
that into the picture, is if you're running out
of space or something.

Now, I have two computers and twenty drives.
Is that an addiction or bad planning ? or what ? :-)
I have enough drives, I keep a folder that just has
lists of files on each hard drive. To try to manage
them.

Paul
Ads
  #47  
Old May 11th 18, 07:28 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Mark Twain
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,402
Default O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)

Here's what I'm up to; following your advise,
I'm trying to take advantage of the availability
of good quality HD's while still available.
Especially since all new computers, even the
refurbished models come with Windows 10 so I'm
trying to stock up while I can to keep the 8500
up and running and on Win 7 Professional.

It's not a matter of upgrading in size or running
out of space, 2TB suits me fine, (In fact I have 788
GB of free space on my 1TB on the 8500) It's a case of
maintaining what I have.

I just thought why not have a second back-up for
the WD (Mrimgs) because if I loose that drive I loose
all my Mrimgs. So I could just copy the Mrimg folder from
one drive to another and then continue from that point.
and/or I could just buy the HD's and leave them in their
boxes.

At present I have (2) spare cloned HD's for the 8500.
My thought was to buy a total of (3) more HD's, (1) for
the WD(Mrimg) backup and (2) for spare cloned HD's for the 780
that I'll all put back in their boxes after cloning except the
WD backup for Mrimgs.

Thoughts/Suggestions?
Robert
  #48  
Old May 11th 18, 07:32 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Mark Twain
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,402
Default O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)

Another thing that crossed my mind was
the power supply. As I remember you
were able to find me one for the 8200.

So I'm wondering if I should consider
getting another power supply for the 8500
and 780?

Could you point me to what I would need
if they still make it? or should I worry?

Thanks,
Robert
  #49  
Old May 11th 18, 09:24 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)

Mark Twain wrote:
Another thing that crossed my mind was
the power supply. As I remember you
were able to find me one for the 8200.

So I'm wondering if I should consider
getting another power supply for the 8500
and 780?

Could you point me to what I would need
if they still make it? or should I worry?

Thanks,
Robert


One hint on power supplies, is the colors on
the wiring harness.

You may find that the 20 pin pattern of the one
in the 8200, doesn't match the 8500 or the 780.

It could be that the 8200 had the proprietary wire
colors on the 20 pin main connector. If you plugged
a standard supply in there, something might pop as
a result.

Whereas Dell eventually saw the light, and moved
to using standard supplies. In which case, there's
no reason to panic about finding a substitute.

The colors are in the spec.

Spec 1.3 has the 20 pin connector.

http://www.formfactors.org/developer...X12V_1_3dg.pdf

Spec 2.2 introduces the 24 pin connector. The 20 pin
and the 24 pin share colors, and when doing so, pin 1
aligns with pin 1 on the other one.

http://www.formfactors.org/developer...public_br2.pdf

A disturbing trend on modern supplies, is the shift to
all-black wiring. This makes it harder to do debugging,
if looking inside a case. The color scheme the standard
uses, is really useful, even for end users.

In terms of size, two dimensions are standard. The third
dimension "length" of the supply can vary quite a bit.
Supplies with high power output, are longer. Other supplies,
can actually manage to be a tiny bit shorter than the original.
The two dimensions that are standard, help hold the supply
in place. The mechanical support and the drill pattern need
to match, to make them easy to swap.

Some supplies come with switches on the back and others don't.
Some supplies are fixed voltage, while the majority today
should be autoswitching. I think the Sparkle supply I
bought for the old computer, it has a slide switch to
select between 110V and 220V. But many others take
care of that for you.

So compare the table which gives colors for the main
power connector, and compare it to what you see plugged
into the motherboard. And that will tell you whether there
is any reason to get excited or not. Finding one of those
custom Dell ones now, it would probably be a Chinese one.
Whereas years ago, PCPowerAndCooling had a nice line of
those things (Dell custom). It's possible finding
one for the 8200 would be a challenge. But nothing
prevents an enterprising user from taking a removal
tool, pulling the pins out of the shell, and moving
the wires around.

Paul
  #50  
Old May 11th 18, 09:28 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)

Mark Twain wrote:
Here's what I'm up to; following your advise,
I'm trying to take advantage of the availability
of good quality HD's while still available.
Especially since all new computers, even the
refurbished models come with Windows 10 so I'm
trying to stock up while I can to keep the 8500
up and running and on Win 7 Professional.

It's not a matter of upgrading in size or running
out of space, 2TB suits me fine, (In fact I have 788
GB of free space on my 1TB on the 8500) It's a case of
maintaining what I have.

I just thought why not have a second back-up for
the WD (Mrimgs) because if I loose that drive I loose
all my Mrimgs. So I could just copy the Mrimg folder from
one drive to another and then continue from that point.
and/or I could just buy the HD's and leave them in their
boxes.

At present I have (2) spare cloned HD's for the 8500.
My thought was to buy a total of (3) more HD's, (1) for
the WD(Mrimg) backup and (2) for spare cloned HD's for the 780
that I'll all put back in their boxes after cloning except the
WD backup for Mrimgs.

Thoughts/Suggestions?
Robert


If you're doing a disk-to-disk file copy, you can
do that from file explorer. You don't have to do all
file operations as clones. Copying is OK once in a while,
and definitely makes sense when copying the backup you make
tomorrow, from one external drive to a second external drive.

If you want all the drives to be bootable in an
emergency, then you can clone the part that boots.
(In Disk Management, you see the words "System", "Boot", "Active",
marking the things you want to clone to make the disk
bootable).

So I suppose the answer is yes, you can use Cloning
as the first step, but when new backups are added to one
drive, you can just copy the MRIMG file to a second drive.

Paul
  #51  
Old May 11th 18, 04:42 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Mark Twain
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,402
Default O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)

I do want all the drives to be bootable
and will take your advice and use file
explorer to move the Mrimg files from
one external HD to another

Here's my 8500 and 780 power supply/wiring

8500:

http://i67.tinypic.com/2nimjc5.jpg

http://i65.tinypic.com/j9r7rc.jpg

780:

http://i65.tinypic.com/2i67lx.jpg


Robert


  #52  
Old May 11th 18, 04:45 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Mark Twain
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,402
Default O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)

All black wires? That is a disturbing
trend,.. why in the world would they
do such a thing?

That totally defies common sense. Colored
wires tell you what is what.

Robert

  #53  
Old May 11th 18, 06:52 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)

Mark Twain wrote:
I do want all the drives to be bootable
and will take your advice and use file
explorer to move the Mrimg files from
one external HD to another

Here's my 8500 and 780 power supply/wiring

8500:

http://i67.tinypic.com/2nimjc5.jpg

http://i65.tinypic.com/j9r7rc.jpg

780:

http://i65.tinypic.com/2i67lx.jpg


Robert


I'm not sure I'm focused on the right thing on the 780.

At least a portion of the 8500 connector appears to align
with the color sequence.

https://s14.postimg.cc/ksc81jhlt/mai...or_24_pins.jpg

Paul
  #54  
Old May 11th 18, 07:01 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)

Mark Twain wrote:
All black wires? That is a disturbing
trend,.. why in the world would they
do such a thing?

That totally defies common sense. Colored
wires tell you what is what.

Robert


It goes along with filling the computer with
colored LEDs and having an acrylic or tempered
glass door, so you can "look at the guts".

It's for the kids that never had an aquarium
tank when they were younger :-)

You can see the all-black wires of the main power
connector, underneath the two hoses coming from the
CPU. The CPU has a "water block". The two hoses
lead to the "radiator" on the right. By making the
wires all-black, the wire colors don't "distract"
from whatever the important stuff is supposed to be
in there. And the CPU likely has a water block so
it will look "pretty" or something.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/zS...CikDV2Lyed.jpg

Paul
  #55  
Old May 12th 18, 01:09 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Mark Twain
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,402
Default O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)

That's still crazy,.. why not just have the
wires with black covers like they have for
car wiring.

Robert
  #56  
Old May 12th 18, 01:14 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Mark Twain
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,402
Default O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)

How about these for the 780:

http://i64.tinypic.com/fypw8.jpg

http://i66.tinypic.com/e7mcef.jpg

Robert
  #57  
Old May 12th 18, 03:32 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)

Mark Twain wrote:
How about these for the 780:

http://i64.tinypic.com/fypw8.jpg

http://i66.tinypic.com/e7mcef.jpg

Robert


In the second picture, on top, I see

orange orange black red black red black

so that much, so far, is standard. Using the
table I put in my previous picture, you can simply
walk your finger down the colored wires in the shell
and verify the colors using the table.

The connectors will either be 20 pin or 24 pin,
and the four pin section on the end of the 24 pin,
is the unique part. There is a 20 pin subset on the
24 pin, so the two connectors are "almost the same".
And they only added a single wire for each of three
rails on the end of the 24 pin, to increase the
amperage the harness could carry.

There should be more pictures of PC wiring, on the
playtool site. If you need a reference.

http://www.playtool.com/pages/psucon...onnectors.html

"The Dell PCs which were carrying this ticking
time-bomb were made between 1996 and 2000. If you're
replacing a Dell power supply from this era then you
should call Dell and make sure it's not a proprietary design."

So according to the guy who runs that site, it's a time
before the 780 and 8500 existed, so your power supplies
should be standard ones (at least in terms of "blowing
stuff up"). You still have to keep your wits about
you, if there are things like auxiliary connectors.

http://www.playtool.com/pages/psucon.../auxthings.jpg

Occasionally, I see those being used in older computers.
I have PSUs here with that connector, but the connector
doesn't get used. If you were buying a supply for
an older computer, you'd check whether that one is
present and in usage too.

There's actually all sorts of trivia for supplies, but
most of it is for EATX and server motherboards. Connectors
that fit and can blow stuff up, and so on. Good fun. The
little Dell fiasco is one of the few significant ones
for desktop systems, and it was... long ago.

Paul
  #58  
Old May 12th 18, 03:36 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)

Mark Twain wrote:
That's still crazy,.. why not just have the
wires with black covers like they have for
car wiring.

Robert


Style is apparently everything in this business.

But if you see any discussion threads about this
stuff, most people think the manufacturers are nuts.
The manufacturers think they've invented hula hoops.
And their customers are yawning. So there's a bit
of a disconnect between what the manufacturers are
trying to do, and what's important to customers.

Paul
  #59  
Old May 12th 18, 07:48 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Mark Twain
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,402
Default O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)

This is way over my head,.. I
wouldn't know what to buy even
if I figured out the wires/connectors.

That's why I was hoping you could
just point me to something. I didn't
realize it was so involved.

However, you said not to worry about
power supplies, correct?

Robert

  #60  
Old May 12th 18, 07:58 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Mark Twain
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,402
Default O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)

Well I guess in some ways it's expected
because the gaming industry was responsible
for much of the advances in computers so
it only follows they would make 'fish tanks'
etc out of them for visual appeal.


It still makes no practical sense though.
It's difficult enough with colored wires!

Robert

 




Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off






All times are GMT +1. The time now is 03:35 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright ©2004-2024 PCbanter.
The comments are property of their posters.