I’m looking at several options to backup my new pc. What I really want is a full image backup of the drive. That way I can recover quickly after a hard drive crash or a bad virus attack. Heck sometimes a bad software install can make windows unstable.
I do manually copy my docs folder, music folders, and videos to a second physical drive in the pc. It’s Windows I’m mostly worried about protecting.
I guess Restore Points are the first line of defense. I’ve had mixed results using them. A PC at the office had a virus. Restoring back didn’t fix it. I still create a restore point before installing software. I’m not convinced it will always save a pc.
Win 7 has a new Backup feature. I’ve just started reading about it. Anyone have personal experience with it? Does it create a drive image?
What about 3rd party software? Any brands considered good? I looked at Nero Backup. Does what I want. But they don’t sell it in the U.S.
How about protecting data on CD’s? Is it worth putting files in RAR’s and creating PAR files? I lost a collection of magazine scans on a CD that went bad sitting in a drawer. I got read errors on almost half the files. That’s more than PAR’s could save.
External harddrive is my vote. Lots of them have built-in restore/backup software.
Just make sure you avoid Memeo like the plague, always had problems with it, and lots of other people seem to as well going by my googling for solutions.
Windows 7 backup can do drive images, and will help you make a system restore disk as part of the process.
Last time I looked into this, I liked Acronis TrueImage, which can back up data at the sector level (if you wanted it to) to essentially make a perfect image of the drive – boot sector and all.
But the data is the most valuable part. Windows reinstallations are easy and often force you to clean up the hard drive and get latest drivers, etc.
I usually just use an online backup solution – Mozy, Syncplicity, Jungledisk, etc. – and not have to worry about rotting physical media. They’re all encrypted these days and stored on pretty reliable data centers. Mozy (and maybe others) also let you auto-backup to an external drive if you really wanted to.
Acronis just released True Image Home 2011. It supports Win 7. I used Acronis Privacy Expert at work. It’s similar to ccleaner. I haven’t used their backup software.
First I need to look at what Win 7 offers. No sense in spending $$$ unless I have too.
I use Mozy and love it. The initial upload can take forever, depending on how much data you have, but after that the differentials are very fast. While I haven’t tried doing a full restore of a machine, individual files are quick and easy. The price is well worth the peace of mind, and there are some sweet promotional deals for new subscribers.
If you do decide to go the external hard drive route, note that if you buy a Western Digital one, you can download a specially-branded version of Acronis True Image for free. It will work as long there is at least one WD drive attached to the machine, and it has all the features needed for making backup images. I just used it to clone my home machine’s hard drive and resize partitions. It’s every bit as slick as the professional version of True Image.
Another vote for Acronis True Image. The latest version has a new feature (Nonstop Backup); you just set it up, and forget it. It constantly keeps the backup up to date.
I don’t like W7 backup. But if you don’t want to get your hands dirty with the details, it’s a good alternative. All you can basically tell it is that you want to do an image backup and point it to a drive where the backup will be stored. I don’t think you can set a schedule and you can’t point it to a subdirectory on the target drive. You can’t set any other options either.
I like Acronis, but if you go that route, be sure to create the bootable media they recommend for each machine you install it on. I had been using an older version a few years back and tried to create the media on another machine and couldn’t use the backups I’d created. I don’t know if that is still an issue, but it’s best to follow the recommendations anyway (usually).
Right now I use GFI backup on all of my machines. It’s freeware, which by itself isn’t that big of a deal, but it’s one of the few that will allow you to backup to an FTP server and encrypt your backups. However its setup isn’t really intuitive. It’s not convoluted or kludgey, it’s just not always obvious how to go about getting it to do what you want. Of course I can be a bit brain dead at times so the fault could be with me rather than the software.
The one thing I would recommend is that whatever you use, you do periodic manual backups (again, not an option w7 backup). If you get another virus, odds are won’t discover it immediately. That means that you may not know how far back you need to go to get a clean system - if that’s even an option. Most software will let you decide how many prior versions to keep, but that’s not always the case. Even when it is, you might just want to go back to a version that you know for a fact was good rather than trying every one in between.
I used Mozy for a while but at some point, the backups just became interminable. Granted I wasn’t using it just to do an image of my boot drive, but that really turned me off to them. Also, Mozy doesn’t keep files that you delete. Normally an earlier backup will have them, but since Mozy only keeps what’s current you don’t have that option. I could be wrong about this, but if that is a consideration, you should find out for sure.
It’s not exactly a drive image - you can restore individual files - but it does create a backup from which you can restore your system onto a blank HDD after booting with the Windows 7 DVD.
I’m building a new PC soon and I’m waiting for the parts to arrive. That said, I’m currently running Win7 on an old 60gb IDE drive while I wait for my parts to arrive. What is the cheapest/most efficient way of saving the image to an external HDD and then reloading it onto my NEW internal HDD?
Is this possible? Keep in mind the new HDD will be completely blank so the restore will likely have to take place using the Win7 CD. Once again, somehow I doubt this is possible.
A Windows Home Server is the best computer “accessory” I’ve ever purchased. Mine is the Acer H340, but several other companies make similar servers. It backs up all my PCs every night automatically, and also serves as a network storage device.
OK. The first thing that that comes to mind is the idea of using an existing installation of windows with a new motherboard. You will get a variety of opinions on this and I think in most cases people will say that it is not possible. However I have done this myself several times and have not had any serious problems other than the fact that I had to do an upgrade install of XP.
By “upgrade”, I mean reinstalling the OS over top of the existing installation without deleting it and starting fresh. That was pretty straight forward with XP. W7 seems to be much more troublesome in that regard. I don’t think I’ve been able to do it even once with W7.
That aside, looking just at the logistics, the easiest thing to do is install both the old and new drives in another machine and image one to the other with something like Acronis True Image. There are probably freeware programs that will also do it though. Check the popular download sites like download.com or maybe this site. I stumbled upon them today and they look decent. Download.com will let you specify the license type (trial software, shareware or freeware) for your search.
Otherwise, as you mentioned, you will have to first install the OS on the new machine and then, with the old drive in the new machine as something other than the boot drive, you would have to image that to another partition on the new drive (since the active boot partition would already have the OS on it). That will involve setting the new drive up for dual booting (although you can really have multiple os’es despite the “dual” moniker). I can’t help too much with that since I haven’t done that in quite a while.
The thing is, that it is unlikely you would be able to successfully boot to a fully functional OS when you tried to boot from the image. It will have the drivers and other parameters for the old hardware and there is basically a zero chance that they will all work with the new hardware. That was why I always still had to do a complete reinstall. It just wasn’t as painful because I was able to keep all of my old software once the drivers for the new hardware were installed along with the OS over top of the existing install.
Yeah, all of the parts will be new and there will be countless driver conflicts. I figured that this would maybe be POSSIBLE but not practical. It’s even less practical because my old SATA drive blew up and I JUST recently started using the 60gb IDE drive (formatted). I won’t be losing much, but I was just wondering if this were possible. After careful consideration, I don’t think it would be worth it. I do have an external HDD and I will move as much as I can.
Acronis is tried and tested at my office. And remember after the initial backup you can do incremental backups as many times as you feel comfortable, they run much faster than a full backup and just back up what has been changed since last backup. I’d suggest a full backup once a week and incrementals each day. Or if your data is less critical, a full backup at the end of each month and an incremental each week.
Yeah, a problem I’ve had a few times with Acronis is that newer hardware is not always supported, so it doesn’t recognise your disk until/unless Acronis provide a version that supports it. I’ve strated using DriveImageXML instead (free for personal use). It has a BartPE plug-in, and BartPE is a live Windows XP environment that runs from CD or other bootable device. So as long as you have the Windows drivers for the target disk on your PC, you can use BartPE + DriveImageXML to restore. To back up, you just run it from within your normal Windows environment, no need for BartPE.
I’ll echo this. WHS really is the business, but don’t get any of those headless WHS boxes. You want one into which you can plug a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Just in case it goes wrong. And WHS v2 is in beta.