On Apr 7, 10:51*pm, John Rumm wrote:
On 07/04/2012 17:45, NT wrote:



On Apr 7, 4:29 pm, *wrote:
*wrote in message

. ..

On Sat, 7 Apr 2012 15:43:17 +0100, "Mentalguy2k8"
*wrote:

*wrote in message
news:FL6dnTF1V9yM1x3SnZ2dnUVZ8o6dnZ2d@brightvi ew.co.uk...
Can I use something like this to backup my PC. *Its making funny noises
at
the moment and I would like to back up the hard disc including the OS.
I'm using Windows XP.

http://www.tekheads.co.uk/product/32...e-Black-Slim-E...

Yes, as long as it's big enough to hold all your stuff.

Just remember that you need to "clone" your C: drive if you want to copy
your OS onto another drive to use as you were before. This creates an
exact
copy, if you just drag and drop the files from C: to a backup and then
onto
a new C: , it won't boot or work properly.

If you buy a 1 or 2 terabyte Samsung USB external hard drive it
includes back up software.
--

Martin

Cheers guys *:-)

I've also never seen the point in backing up windows. If you need to
reinstall it, do it the windows way. Yes its slower, but youre asking
for trouble otherwise, IME its just not worth cloning.

Can't quite work out what difference the OS in use makes as to whether a
system is worth backing up or not?

Its your data, application configuration, and installation set that matter.

On 08/04/2012 12:13, NT wrote:
On Apr 7, 11:13 pm, John wrote:
On 07/04/2012 22:36, Martin wrote:



On Sat, 7 Apr 2012 09:45:42 -0700 (PDT),
wrote:

On Apr 7, 4:29 pm, wrote:
wrote in message

...

On Sat, 7 Apr 2012 15:43:17 +0100, "Mentalguy2k8"
wrote:

wrote in message
o.uk...
Can I use something like this to backup my PC. Its making funny noises
at
the moment and I would like to back up the hard disc including the OS.
I'm using Windows XP.

http://www.tekheads.co.uk/product/32...e-Black-Slim-E...

Yes, as long as it's big enough to hold all your stuff.

Just remember that you need to "clone" your C: drive if you want to copy
your OS onto another drive to use as you were before. This creates an
exact
copy, if you just drag and drop the files from C: to a backup and then
onto
a new C: , it won't boot or work properly.

If you buy a 1 or 2 terabyte Samsung USB external hard drive it
includes back up software.
--

Martin

Cheers guys :-)

I've also never seen the point in backing up windows. If you need to
reinstall it, do it the windows way. Yes its slower, but youre asking
for trouble otherwise, IME its just not worth cloning.

One thing I did to save time was to copy the apps in /program files en
masse, and just copy them straight back into windows. Its surprising
how many work fine this way - some will still need reinstalling the
windows way.

The way to backup your data is simply to add the 2nd drive, control a
c in one pane, control v in the other. Job done, software pointless.
Yes you can restore bookmarks, but I find its not usually worth it, I
just redo the ones I want.

Switching to linux makes this process easier, this distro is a dream
to install compared to win.

Unless you have boards/peripherals which aren't supported.

Sure. PCI cards are handy for that, or just pass the machine on to
someone else that wants windows.


Installing Win7 is straight forward.

But very sloooow... that's before you apply all the monthly patches, and
reinstall apps. Bit of a mugs game when recovering from an image is so
much faster and easier.

Linux is /so/ much easier. It makes cloning pointless.

No really it doesn't...

There is no way I would like to have to rebuild our dead rat server from
scratch if it went tits up. It took tens if not hundreds of man hours to
get everything setup on it as required. As it stands we can recover the
main drive from the cloned version in about 20 mins (well rackspace can
since if it were hosed completely we could probably not log in anyway!).
That stuff matters when their are contractual penalties for exceeding
certain amounts of down time.



--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

On 08/04/2012 12:25, NT wrote:
On Apr 7, 10:51 pm, John wrote:
On 07/04/2012 17:45, NT wrote:



On Apr 7, 4:29 pm, wrote:
wrote in message

...

On Sat, 7 Apr 2012 15:43:17 +0100, "Mentalguy2k8"
wrote:

wrote in message
o.uk...
Can I use something like this to backup my PC. Its making funny noises
at
the moment and I would like to back up the hard disc including the OS.
I'm using Windows XP.

http://www.tekheads.co.uk/product/32...e-Black-Slim-E...

Yes, as long as it's big enough to hold all your stuff.

Just remember that you need to "clone" your C: drive if you want to copy
your OS onto another drive to use as you were before. This creates an
exact
copy, if you just drag and drop the files from C: to a backup and then
onto
a new C: , it won't boot or work properly.

If you buy a 1 or 2 terabyte Samsung USB external hard drive it
includes back up software.
--

Martin

Cheers guys :-)

I've also never seen the point in backing up windows. If you need to
reinstall it, do it the windows way. Yes its slower, but youre asking
for trouble otherwise, IME its just not worth cloning.

Can't quite work out what difference the OS in use makes as to whether a
system is worth backing up or not?

Its your data, application configuration, and installation set that matter.

I always keep data separate to OS, it makes life so much simpler. The
data is what I value.

Well indeed, so do most of us I am sure...

App config takes little time to set up I find.

Unless you have a trivial installation, I don't buy that. It depends a
bit on what you are using it for to an extent, but in server
applications there can be lots of incremental setup that has happened
over time, and its very easy to underestimate how long it takes to
recreate it.

Apps installed seems in practice to change gradually over time, so for
me not very useful to clone.

It needs to be part of a strategy, and not just a once off. Disaster
recovery backups (clones if you wish) don't need to be done that often,
so long as they can get you back to a 90% functional system quickly, and
then you can run a more conventional restore operation to recover the
recent tweaks from an incremental.

Sam logic applies to keeping a relatively recent image of a virtual machine.

In short I've just had better results cleaner and easier to reinstall
from scratch each time. If one maintains 100 computers, of course that
won't be the case, but for not many I find it is, after trying it both
ways.

Horses for courses...

The prospect of rebuilding one of my main development platforms from
scratch I try to keep to less than once per decade!



One thing I did to save time was to copy the apps in /program files en
masse, and just copy them straight back into windows. Its surprising
how many work fine this way - some will still need reinstalling the
windows way.

Makes more sense if you also backup the HKLM/Software hive of the
registry as well. However even that will still miss important stuff.

The way to backup your data is simply to add the 2nd drive, control a
c in one pane, control v in the other. Job done, software pointless.

Its not a good backup strategy, since if you overwrite the the target
you destroy your previous backup in the process and also lose any
ability to go back to a previous version of a file. If you use a
different target directory then it rather profligate with space since
there is none of the de-duping that proper incremental would do.

First I would hope people have more than one backup medium, so
overwriting the last version doesnt happen. 2nd disc space is cheap
enough to put 2 complete copies on each of the media, or if people
need to penny pinch one can simply delete redundant copes of
relatively low priority data. If one had multiple terabytes of data I
daresay that equation would change.

Yup, two backup volumes is much better than one...

In my case I used the two volumes to take image backups of the NAS in
rotation. That has a RAID mirror containg disaster recovery images plus
daily incrementals.

Yes you can restore bookmarks, but I find its not usually worth it, I
just redo the ones I want.

Switching to linux makes this process easier, this distro is a dream
to install compared to win.

Which would suggest there is less point backing up that OS than windows
if you follow that argument through.

Yup.

Does that not contradict the "no point backing up windows statement" you
made at the start? ;-)


--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

On Apr 7, 10:25*pm, fred wrote:
In article
, NT
writes



On Apr 7, 9:00*pm, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:
fred wrote:
In article
,
NT
writes

I've also never seen the point in backing up windows. If you need to
reinstall it, do it the windows way. Yes its slower, but youre asking
for trouble otherwise, IME its just not worth cloning.

For a new machine I take an image after the windows install and again
after the major apps go on.

If it all turns to **** later then that saves quite a bit of time on the
reinstall.

I did that at one time. But didnt use the images in practice. Usually
things dont go that wrong, and if they do I tended to want a different
setup anyway. With xp and on if you upgrade hardware at the same time,
it wont work anyway. So it all gets a bit pointless.

Useful in the case of a system drive doing bad, it means a system can be
back up and running in short order. The OS & apps image fits on a DVD so
it's easy to have one in a drawer just in case.

It's nice to keep a copy if it's taken a while to get the best driver
combo together, particularly on say a fussy laptop.
--
fred
it's a ba-na-na . . . .- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Don't forget to remove the original before running the clone.
From my experience windows gets confused otherwise.