Backup strategy

Dave - my PC crashed last wednesday. I tried to get it to work by using the "Vista repair" option on the install DVD. I wish I'd just gone back to my backup software. I started it this morning and by the time I came home, the PC was back to where it was when it crashed (I do a daily backup of all 3 pc's on the home network).

Now, as it happens, the registry was corrupt and I restoreed a "corrupt" version of it. So I've had to go through the motions again. However, I've done this knowing that I didn't lose any data at all. Not a position I've been in before and very glad I spent the money to get here.

When you have the comfort of knowing a crash will result in no or very very little data loss, you can restore at leisure.

Believe me, its a much bigger piece of mind than you can imagine - nut of course you'll only know when you crash and burn and disk or install an errant driver of program...

Dave

oh man, over the past 15 years or so I've lost many a C drive, so what I'll be doing soon is making a clone (using ghost) of the C drives on all my PCs and laptops, now that I have the space to store these clones.
If I drop a C drive, all I need do is replace the drive, boot up using my bootable usb stick, restore the drive using ghost and I'll have my C back the way it was.

Lads,
I have to say,
I'm worried.
I have 2 laptops.
I keep nothing of value except programes on them.
One is portable one is hooked up to an old Del Monitor (for image processing)
I store everything...
astro photos, mp3's, family stuff...
all on an external hard dive that I can plug into either.
The drive came with a recovery guarentee so ..
I hope if it ever failed we could get our stuff back.

ALTHOUGH..
I'm now thinking we need to back up our back up.
(ITMS)
I really can't follow what you guys are at with drives this
and ghosts that.
I think it might be ok if we just back up the back up.
Because then we would have some hope of pulling everything back if there was a crash.

Frank - perhaps you could use the hard-disks in the laptop(s) to store all your "work in progress" and use the external device as a backup drive. Essentialy, just take the external drive and divide it up either into two volumes (laptop 1 and laptop 2) or two folders (same names) and simply plug it into laptop 1, backup, then laptop 2 and backup. The supplied Windows backup software should be sufficient. I'd recommend backing up daily if you use the laptops on a daily basis.

This scheme won't cost you a penny and "should" allow you to restore either laptop, including all its software.

An alternative scheme would be to buy a second external drive and simply copy the primary external drive to your new one (again, daily would be best).

What you should do anyhow is make sure your backup can be run so that it will restore either laptop, including software installations. Though, fire away and just backup data files (e.g. docs, images etc) but be prepared to re-install all your software from scratch...

I'm not sure what would be the best software to use - personally, I use Retrospect from EM2 (got it "free" with the NAS drive). I'm pretty sure the supplied windows software would do a good enough job though.

One other word of warning - do not assume "programmes" are of no intrinsic value... For things like Photoshop and astro software, there's a pretty large investement in setting it up the way you like it. If you have to re-install, it can be a real pain inputting all those settings from scratch. Take it from me, its a lesson I've learned from bitter experience...

Finally - you have a "recovery gurantee"? Not sure what that means - but if a drive crashes (in a physically damaged kind of way), its, err, crashed and only by paying a shed load of money to an expert, can you hope to get it back. Sure, if its a software glitch, its simply a pain in the bum and you'll miss quite a few dark nights...

HTH

Dave

Dave,
thanks for the advice.
I'll mull it over and make sure to have some
kind of back up in place soon.

Barberskum wrote:

The drive came with a recovery guarentee so ..
I hope if it ever failed we could get our stuff back.

I seriously doubt it, I'd imagine what that means is that you might be able to get the laptop back the way it was when you bought it, maybe from a EISA partition on the drive, presuming windows is corrupt with no hardware problems.
If you get a mechanical fault in the drive, maybe your warrenty will cover replacing the drive and getting windows up and running, presuming the warrenty hasnt expired.
I'd seriously doubt they'd cover recovering data from a blown drive.