I’ve been using HP’s disaster recovery to back up my system for about the last year with no real problems until lately. I keep getting a warning message that my registry contains invalid keys. I’ve tried using RegClean but haven’t had any improvement. I will probably restore my system from backup anyway, but I would like to know if anyone could recommend an alternate backup package. I’m especially interested in whether you have actually had to use the backup software to recover your system. (For the record, I run Windows 95 rev.B and use a HP 8100i drive.)
Adaptec ezcd makes Take Two & Norton Ghost is supposed to be able to do it too, but I couldn’t figure out how.
Take Two is designed to do it. You’d do much better getting a new HD & copy to that & keep the old one for backup. HD’s are amazingly cheap these days.
System Suite has great utilities to clean your registry. You could just use that instead. It finds all links & such all by itself, I usually have a few hundred entries that it cleans for me.
Handy,
Who makes System Suite, and what else can it do besides make system backups?
I had thought about backing up to another hard drive before. You’re right, the drives are dirt cheap now and it would be faster than hell to do the drive-to-drive copy. Might have trouble convincing the wife that I want to buy another HD just strictly for backup purposes, though. I’ll probably stick to the CD-R backup route for now.
Thanks!
I use pkzip to archive all the files that I’ve actually created. This is then about a 30 MB zip file, which I write to the CDR.
This way, I have an archive of all the previous versions in case I need to get at them. If I suffer a disk crash, I’ll reinstall all my applications, and then restore my data from the backup. This will take a while, but it’s worth it, having a simpler backup scheme which I’ll do more often.
Another reason is that the Windows Registry gets full of old junk, and if I need to restore the system, I don’t want to just restore the old registry - I want to rebuild it by reinstalling all the applications.
Actually, I use WinZip’s command-line interface instead of pkzip, because pkzip 2.50 did not have the feature of being able to clear the archive bit on files when it zips them. I created a text file containing a list of all the files and directories I want to back up, and then use the “@filename” specifier on the command line to tell it to zip the files in that list.
Guy, System Suite doesn’t back up files, it cleans the registry & does a lot of other maintenance.
How large a HD do you have?