Backing up an entire hard disk (from C to D drive)

Factual Questions
1

Make that: From C drive to F drive.

I just added a second HD and want to backup the whole enchilada: Windows XP, updates, my apps, data files, settings, everything.

Basically, I want to skip the aggravations should C drive bite the dust. I guess we’re talking mirroring, but pls. realize Carnac did not graduate from MIT and isn’t conversant with the Video Professor.

My dream system would, if C drive dies, allow me to skip over to drive F, later replace C and then transfer everything from F back to the new C.

Possible?

May a diseased yak soil your virgin daughter’s heirloom burka. :wink:

2

Let me add: would one of those “one-touch” hard drives back up the OS and apps, or only the data files?

3

You can only set up RAID 1 (mirroring) if you “promote” your current hard drives to Dymanic Volumes and set up mirroring that way. But you’d need a RAID controller to allow the disks to be able to do that. There might be 3rd party software that can do it and lets you bypass the Windows hubbub but i don’t know of any.

Depending on the OS (Win2k or XP) there are different ways of backing up. It’s just simplest to use a wizard. If you want to backup the OS and everything you’d want to use the Data and System State option in W2k. Or in XP use the bullet that says to back up everything.

4

I think you are referring to an external USB. You can use those and program that button to back up the same data basically. You’d be using that brand’s backup software which works just as well as Windows, or you could also use the Windows backup and just treat the external drive as another logical drive (drive letter, like G: or H: or something).

5

Wouldn’t Norton Ghost do what you’re looking for?

6

The Microsoft XP backup guide is a good starting point. But basically, you can’t create a direct copy of Windows while Windows is running, because it’s constantly changing system files all the time. To make a true clone of the hard drive, you need a utility that operates outside of Windows. Which may be more hassle than it’s worth, depending on how valuable your time is should you ever need to do a clean reinstall of everything.

7

It would, and it would also run around $60 or $70. Perhaps for CtM but not-so computer-savvy :wink: it would be a worthwhile investment.

8

Been going down this road for a while. Used to use Power Quest Drive Image 2002™ on the Win98SE box to image C to D. D was a removable HDD that lived in a small fireproof enclosure.

Tried to set up the same thing with the new box running Win XP Pro, only connecting the bulk storage external drive via USB 2.0. Problem 1 is that Power Quest wants to run at the boot level, and didn’t play nice with Win XP. I picked up a copy of Ghost which also runs at the boot level, but the USB drive isn’t recognized at system start.

When issues were worked out, backing up a 40GB to an external drive via USB is a 16 hour long process. Then I learned that images will only work to restore if you are imaging them back to an identical machine, e.g. if your computer is stolen, you need to buy one just like it (drive, clock cpeed, SDRAM, etc) or your image is worthless.

Now I use the XP backup utility to backup everything to the USB drive, and that goes in the fireproof enclosure with my original software.

If anybody has better ideas, I’m all ears, too.

9

Well, a fireproof enclosure isn’t nearly as secure as simply storing it at a different location.

10

True enough, but I can’t afford a second house.

11

However (and depending on exactly how important your data is to you) you probably could afford a safe deposit box.

12

Here’s my interest re: backing up XP.

I’ve got many updates, but only a pokey dial-up connection. (Can’t get cable or DSL.)

Having to download all the updates would take 2-3 centuries. Not sure how much the newest service pack would help.

Ultimately, I guess it’s no problem reloading the OS, but it’s just a damn waste of time, unless you subscribe to the Reinstall OS Twice a Year" club.

13

My entire business (and thus my life) resides on my computer, so I have designed my backup procedures so that, in case of a hard disk failure, my critical data files are protected and I can get the operating system and my applications up and running ASAP.

I have two 120 GB hard disks, each partitioned into two logical drives. Drive 1 is split into a 20 GB partition ( C: ) and a 100 GB ( E: ), and Drive 2 is 100 ( D: ) and 20 ( F: ).

The operating system (Win 2000) and my programs are on C, and all my data are on D. (BTW, there are operational advantages to putting data on a separate physical drive from the OS and programs: things tend to run a little faster.) Most applications can easily be configured to store their data on a different drive, and for those few that can’t (MS Outlook), I have written a batch file that runs automatically at midnight every night to copy those files (and certain other critical files) to the D partition.

At 1 a.m., Windows Backup backs up the contents of the D partition (drive 2) over to the E partition (drive 1), running a full backup on Friday nights, and incremental Saturday through Thursday. The mix of one full and six incremental backups of the data fits (so far) onto a partition the same size as the source.

At 4 a.m. every morning, PowerQuest Drive Image 7 makes an image of the C partition (drive 1) onto the F partition (drive 2). As danceswithcats says, this program has to run at boot level, so the system reboots into DOS mode, makes the image, and reboots to Win2000 when it’s done.

Note that files from one physical drive are being copied to the other. This makes the process about as fast as it possibly can be. It takes about 40 minutes to image the C partition (about 7GB). I have no idea how long it takes to backup the data drive these days (about 40 GB), but I don’t care, since it’s happening while I sleep.

The intent is to guard primarily against hard disk failure, and my assumption is that it is highly unlikely that both drives would fail simultaneously. But I am not protected against loss of the whole machine to fire or theft. (These are just not risks I consider likely enough to be too concerned about. YMMV.)

I use Drive Image for the C partition because if Drive 1 fails I will want to get a new HD and restore the OS and my programs all at one fell swoop. Drive Image will do that quickly and efficiently, without making me spend hours or days reinstalling and reconfiguring the OS and dozens of programs. Backup won’t.

But I use Backup for the data because more likely than having to restore the whole drive is the possibility of needing to restore a couple of data files that have been accidentally lost or corrupted. Drive Image doesn’t work well for that. (It says it will, but it won’t. Trust me on this.) The advantage of Backup over ordinary copying is the ease of doing incrementals and the slight compression it offers.

The batch files, Backup, and Drive Image (along with Norton AntiVirus and a few other housekeeping programs) are all started automatically each night by Windows Task Scheduler.

Every week or two, I copy the C image from F onto a rewritable DVD, just for an extra level of protection. (I haven’t bothered copying the data onto DVDs, since it would take about ten of them.)

I’ve been using this method for more than a year, and although I haven’t had to restore either drive so far, the process is flexible, easy-to-use, and secure, and protects me from what I feel are my most likely disaster scenarios.

14

I have found Acronis True Image to be way better than Norton Ghost (PowerQuest Drive Image):

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

It’s incredibly simple to use. All you have to do essentially is select C: as source and F: as destination for the backup. It’ll create a backup file on the F: drive which you can later use for restore. I use it to backup my comp atleast once a week. Whenever I get into trouble, I just restore the most recent backup. I also have a backup file which, when I need to format, I’ll just restore, and all my drivers, settings, etc. will be exactly like if I were to spend 2 hours doing it manually on a freshly formatted comp. Backup/Restore takes on average about 15-20mins. on a 20GB partition.

Incase of a total failure (logical) of C:, you can still boot using the Boot CD that Acronis True Image creates, select the backup file from F: and restore everything to exactly as it was. Incase of a total physical failure of C:, you can designate the F: drive (or any other hard disk) as the new C: and restore in the same manner.

15

I just leave my backup CDs in the back of a cupboard at a friend’s house. And I’d be happy to do the same for others, should they ask.

16

xash: can you provide more detail about why you feel True Image is better than Drive Image?

17

Did you get an install disk with your second hard drive?

About five years ago, I replaced my hard drive with a larger one from Western Digital. It included a floppy which allowed me to partition the drive so as to have a C and a D drive. It allowed me to exactly copy C to D and back again. I did this on a regular basis and especially before making any changes which had the possibility of corrupting my system.

If my C drive became corrupted, I would simply copy D to C and keep on going.

18

[ul]
[li]Extremely simple to use. Cleaner UI. Excellent Wizard driven interface.[/li][li]Performs a full system partition backup from within Windows. No boot to DOS required.[/li][li]Offers a simple and straight forward boot disk creation to restore system partition in case of a total corruption of C:[/li][li]Offers the ability to browse within a backup image file to restore a specific file(s) or folder(s)[/li][li]Write image directly to DVD[/li][li]Support for a larger number of OSes, boot media, and system configurations (RAIDs, SAN, etc.)[/li][li]Extremely reliable. Haven’t had a corrupted backup to date. The new version (8.0) now verifies images after creation.[/li]
[/ul]

Seeing that you are a power user, I strongly suggest testing out Acronis True Image 8.0. It compares favourably with Norton Ghost 9 (which uses the PowerQuest Drive Image 7 engine, now that Symantec has bought over PowerQuest).

You won’t need to set your system to reboot at nights to create the backups, allowing you to continue any downloads while backing up. It also has an option called an Acronis Secure Zone, which creates a protected partition where you can store your image files, such that no running process can corrupt your backup files. If you use this option you don’t even need a rescue CD, just press F11 on bootup and it will boot into the Secure Zone allowing you to restore any previously backed up image. You can schedule for incremental backups on a daily basis, and full system backups on weekly or monthly basis. It’s got its own scheduler. You can also select the size of the resulting image files (e.g. 650MB parts for backup onto CD, etc.)

Norton Ghost 9 works only with Windows 2000 and XP, and requires the .NET framework installed.

Here’s a review of Acronis True Image 8.0 with screen shots:

http://www.acronis.com/company/inpress/2004/10-22-bleedinedge-trueimage.html

19

Would Acronis allow me a speedy image to my backup USB drive without the issues I spoke of in post #8?

20

Acronis True Image has worked fine for me on XP Pro, and works from within Windows, so under normal circumstances you wouldn’t need to boot to DOS to create/restore a backup.

I have no personal experience with backing up to a USB drive, but Acronis supports USB drives over USB 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0

From the Acronis support forum:

“I use an Iomega 40GB USB external HDD. I get restore speeds on 8 minutes for a 10GB NTFS System partition. The System partition has 6GB of data.”

While that post talks about restore speeds and not backup speeds, it’s still a fair indication of USB transfer rates with Acronis. So unless there’s some sort of conflict with the hardware/software configuration that you are running, this hopefully shouldn’t be an issue.

I haven’t had this problem, except that if you change your hardware configuration your old drivers/settings will not (obviously) work right away with your new hardware.

Also, if you are intending to restore to a new computer with a different hardware configuration, you will need to run the “Microsoft System Preparation Tool (sysprep)”:

“One problem from duplicating an installation of Windows 2000 is that each cloned computer has the same security identifier (SID) and computer name. This may prevent the cloned computers from functioning correctly in a workgroup or a domain. To work around this problem, administrators use the System Preparation Tool (Sysprep.exe) to remove configuration settings that are unique to the computer, such as the computer name and SID.” This problem also relates to Windows NT 4.0 and Windows XP, so you should prepare these OS in a similar way. You can download Microsoft System Preparation Tool from www.microsoft.com or extract from deploy.cab located on Windows XP installation CD."

There are some other minor known issues as well, such as it won’t be able to create a backup if you have an old version of Easy CD Creator running (because of interference with the Take Two software in versions prior to 5.1), but once you get it running it’s very smooth.

I can’t guarantee that it will work satisfactorily with your PC, but you could download the 15 day free trial from:

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing//download/trueimage/