ot. pc back up

How big are the drives Richard ?

If you have a DVD writer you should also have some bundled software such as Nero. Alternatively, try Norton Ghost.

Each drive is 80Gb. There is 16Gb used on c drive and 12Gb used on d drive. Richard

I haven't got any bundled software that came with it as I only bought the bare drive. However, I have got Roxio Easy cd 6. Can I just drag each drive to the bottom bit and save it all that way? ie. If I need to can I reinstall from that? Thanks Richard

Richard came up with the following;:

Look up Powerquests Drive Image or Norton Ghost. Though as Powerquest have been taken over by Symantec I guess you might have to hurry to get DI. :(

I use Drive Image, but only 'cos I found it a bit easier to use ... and I got it FOC ... ;)

You're going to have to reinstall Windows first and then restore all the files (and reinstall all the applications). That's a lot of hassle.

I strongly recommend Ghost - you can backup your machine to a DVD or 2 and then restore it in next to no time (under an hour). It's an image of your hard drive, so everything comes back 'as was'. If you've got a network it's even better - just back up to another machine and restore from there.

The only gotch is to make sure that the DVD boot-time drivers under Ghost work OK - I've had 'glitches' before!

For file backups I use HandyBackup to copy changed / new files to an FTP site. I'm fortunate in having a 25Gb FTP account though!

Richard> I would like to do a complete back up of my pc (two hard Richard> drives). I am using Win XP home but it will only let me Richard> back up to floppy. Anyone know the best way to back up to Richard> cd or dvd.

I bought an external USB2.0 drive for my machine, and I backup to that with Ghost 9.0. I leave the external drive switched off except for once a week or so when I do the backup.

If you have two drives, are you trying to back up both drives, or from one to the other?

Andy

Need to back up both drives as D drive is mainly pics, Landrovers, Holiday, Dalek build etc. I have been looking at an external drive and thought it was a good idea. What make is yours? Richard

Why not put all data on one drive, then use Norton Ghost to clone one to the other?

This way, should the first drive die, simply swap them over.

Why doesn't Windoze have its own rsync - rsync is god for backups (no, I haven't missed an 'o' there...) :-)

Richard came up with the following;:

Can't you combine all the data etc to one drive, then use an image or ghost to copy it to the other?

Or run it as a raid array so that everything is automatically copied to the other to ensure continuity?

Or use the hd proprietary software to copy the drive one to the other once a week?

Windoze does software RAID???

Mother"

Richard> Need to back up both drives as D drive is mainly pics, Richard> Landrovers, Holiday, Dalek build etc. I have been Richard> looking at an external drive and thought it was a good Richard> idea. What make is yours? Richard

I got an Argosy one from ATMT (they have a shop on Amazon). It's pretty good - has a standard 5.25" drive inside, so it's recoverable if the USB gubbins dues.

Andy

Dya mean 3.5" drive? :-)

Only Server. Definitely not Home!

IDE RAID hardware is fairly cheap though. You may even be able to get third-party software to do it?

I would never trust Microsoft with my data - as you know.

Was just interested to think that maybe they'd started to do something useful! :-)

Software mirroring has been there since at least NT4, if not further back. The NTFS file system is actually pretty good - I've had no problems with it. FAT, of course, was an abortion from day one and lived far longer than it ever ought to have.

On or around Tue, 23 Aug 2005 08:25:23 GMT, "Richard" enlightened us thusly:

install DVD drive, copy files from disk to DVD.

set it running at bedtime, cos it'll take a while to write if you're talking in GB...

I find it hard to believe that XP home, penc though it is, only allows of backing up to a floppy, though.

Mother"