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backing up windows hard drives.

amazer - November 20th, 2003 at 05:38 PM

whats the bestest easiest way. Had a scare yesterday.

kombi_kid - November 20th, 2003 at 06:15 PM

what?
cheers
rhys

amazer - November 20th, 2003 at 06:19 PM

what what?
what am I asking or what was the scare.

The scare was that yesterday at startup the computer did the memory check, and stopped. After a while it asked for a boot disk. I reset it and same thing happened again. Went to the CMOS thingo and it couldnt detect a hard drive. Today its working OK though.

Riaan - November 20th, 2003 at 06:30 PM

Buy a portable harddrive, you can get em for 100$ aus in malaysia, i shoudl be going next year.

Sky - November 20th, 2003 at 06:40 PM

The Best Investment would be a CD Burner You could pick one up for $60-80, burn your own files.

You can backup your drive using a Windows Utility.

Start. Programs. Accesories. System Tools. Backup.

Riaan - November 20th, 2003 at 07:45 PM

But then you gotta buy cds:P expensive if you earn nothing like:P me

kombi_kid - November 20th, 2003 at 08:06 PM

well buying a $100 external hard drive is 100 so that equals about 300 blank cds!! backup for the rest of your life plus more!!!
cheers
rhys

Riaan - November 20th, 2003 at 08:08 PM

BUt burning takes time, with a portable it takes no time in transferring with teh usb cable and such, well my opinion anyways:thumb

Andy - November 20th, 2003 at 08:41 PM

With '98 and ME I used to dump a copy of the drive (less the windows swap file) on a second hard drive once a fortnight or so (using explorer). If anything happened I swapped cables and was up and running again in a few minutes.
Don't seem to be able to do it with XP any more though
Explorer can't copy a number of system files across. Haven't found a way past it yet :mad:

VW1976 - November 20th, 2003 at 08:52 PM

With a cd burner you could also burn music cd's and games aswell so i think the cd burner would end up paying for itself after a while.

Riaan - November 20th, 2003 at 08:54 PM

Dude everybody has a burner anyway tehse days dont they?

modulus - November 20th, 2003 at 08:55 PM

What Sky said.

Backup to CD-RWs, overwriting each time; 4 discs is enough for a lifetime.

The best approach is to write a batch file which creates a ZIP archive of your data files, including email etc., but excluding programs; then burn the ZIP file to the CD. This avoids a program which can arise when very long file names (including directory info) won't fit to the CD Joliet format. This takes a little setting up, but once done the whole backup process takes 5 minutes of your time (quite a bit longerr computer time, but we all need to eat).

hth

amazer - November 21st, 2003 at 07:48 PM

I've got a burner. Just dont know what to back up really. All these programs I've downloaded from the net. I suppose I am going to lose them anyway cos I dont have the installers. Think I will just copy the My Documents directory. This is going to take forever to zip. Is there a way of finding out how big the file will be before zipping? Paranoid that I will wait 1/2 hour and then the file will be 700MB and not fit on a CD.

kombiluva - November 21st, 2003 at 07:51 PM

Chris,

1.Go get a program call "Ghost"...it runs in DOS.
2.Ghost your OS/HDD to your CD Burner; copy all the files.
3.No problems; if your OS crashes, revert back to the ghost disk and insert the CD and you are good to go!

Cheers
Mick H

modulus - November 21st, 2003 at 07:55 PM

Zipping data files, you'll get at least 50% compression, so you might get as much as 1.5 GB onto a CD (allowing for the fact that one zip file doesn't have the disc-size-used/physical-size inefficiencies of many small files).

If you use Outlook, don't forget to b'up your .PST files (they have email, addresses, appointments etc. etc.).

Once you've got the whole shebang automated, you can fire it off as you pack up at night and go for a :beer.

amazer - November 21st, 2003 at 08:22 PM

Hmm I just started zip and walked away. 20 minutes later I ended up with 1.4GB worth of docs.

modulus - November 21st, 2003 at 08:30 PM

Then you've ... got a lot of docs. ... I'll have a play this weekend, as I'm overdue to revisit my b'up strategy, to see if there is a sensible (automatable) way to divide the work up.

vanderaj - November 21st, 2003 at 08:38 PM

I'd say a lot of pr0n.

Andrew

amazer - November 21st, 2003 at 08:39 PM

yeah a LOT of docs. every set of lecture notes and crap that I have ever got. Every assignment. Too many mp3's, mpegs, jpegs.........
I will just zip up the main directories seperately.

fatboy - November 21st, 2003 at 08:56 PM

Get this

http://www.handybackup.com

it cost $30 US but its the best backup software I've seen including backup exec at more than $2000 Aus.

You can download a 30 day trial to try, it will burn direct to CD and will also span CDs - it uses zip compression so you can read the CD's on any pc with winzip installed.
(Always use the "multiple file option".

I've got quite a few clients using it and so far no complaints.

BTW with files that are already highly compressed such as MP3, mpeg and jpeg, then compressing them again will make them LARGER as the file cannot be compressed any more and the headers for the compression program you use will be added to the begining of the file making it slightly bigger.

DO YOUR BACKUP ASAP you drive is on its way out:thumb

Starbug - November 22nd, 2003 at 08:29 AM

theres only one solution... GO RAID!! if one HDD stuffs up you just use the exact copy on the other! plus... you get more power! muahahahhaaaa!!

sorry, i love raid arrays... they rock my computer!

amazer - November 22nd, 2003 at 12:57 PM

If I had any money at all for computer gear I would at least get more than my current 96MB of ram and win98. I think raid is out fo the question.