Proactive Backup And Restore
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I got burned to the tune of about $75 and a three day wait last time I had a hard drive failure. Sure, I "had a backup". What I learned was that that meant that I had the ability to retrieve ***THE DATA*** from the apps which I had, but it ***DIDN'T MEAN*** that I had the ability to restore the complete disk. Now yes, the data from the apps was the critical aspect, but really, paying gobs of money for a "restore" CD (and waiting for delivery, for which I paid more money, for the "expedited" service to my low density populated town) well,,, you get the idea. Okay, so I want to prepare for the next hard drive failure. This time, I want to use a package that allows me to... - Copy the disk (i.e., the entire image) to the external unit - Change the hard drive - Boot from a CD-Rom - Restore the full image - Reboot and resume with an identical hard drive I'm Currently running Windows 7 on this machine. Any and all advice is welcome. Immediate questions in my head include... - What do I want ? - What questions do I ask ? - Whom do I ask ? - How do I recognize the idiot packages such as the one I used before ? - What are the terms I want to see on the marketing hype ?
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I got burned to the tune of about $75 and a three day wait last time I had a hard drive failure. Sure, I "had a backup". What I learned was that that meant that I had the ability to retrieve ***THE DATA*** from the apps which I had, but it ***DIDN'T MEAN*** that I had the ability to restore the complete disk. Now yes, the data from the apps was the critical aspect, but really, paying gobs of money for a "restore" CD (and waiting for delivery, for which I paid more money, for the "expedited" service to my low density populated town) well,,, you get the idea. Okay, so I want to prepare for the next hard drive failure. This time, I want to use a package that allows me to... - Copy the disk (i.e., the entire image) to the external unit - Change the hard drive - Boot from a CD-Rom - Restore the full image - Reboot and resume with an identical hard drive I'm Currently running Windows 7 on this machine. Any and all advice is welcome. Immediate questions in my head include... - What do I want ? - What questions do I ask ? - Whom do I ask ? - How do I recognize the idiot packages such as the one I used before ? - What are the terms I want to see on the marketing hype ?
I would just add another hard drive (internal or external) and "mirror" the "main" drive; if you really want to make it "forgettable". Back in the day, we used to do disaster recovery by taking the entire "business" (major investment firm) on a disk cartridge and walking it to a bank's data center for rebooting.
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I got burned to the tune of about $75 and a three day wait last time I had a hard drive failure. Sure, I "had a backup". What I learned was that that meant that I had the ability to retrieve ***THE DATA*** from the apps which I had, but it ***DIDN'T MEAN*** that I had the ability to restore the complete disk. Now yes, the data from the apps was the critical aspect, but really, paying gobs of money for a "restore" CD (and waiting for delivery, for which I paid more money, for the "expedited" service to my low density populated town) well,,, you get the idea. Okay, so I want to prepare for the next hard drive failure. This time, I want to use a package that allows me to... - Copy the disk (i.e., the entire image) to the external unit - Change the hard drive - Boot from a CD-Rom - Restore the full image - Reboot and resume with an identical hard drive I'm Currently running Windows 7 on this machine. Any and all advice is welcome. Immediate questions in my head include... - What do I want ? - What questions do I ask ? - Whom do I ask ? - How do I recognize the idiot packages such as the one I used before ? - What are the terms I want to see on the marketing hype ?
Windows 7 already has the feature available to do what you want. From control panel, select Backup and Restore and the from the left menu select "Create a system image". You will need a large portable external drive to store the image (preferably a bootable USB Drive). Boot to recovery and select the disk image you want to restore. Alternatively... Create a bootable usb stick with toxboot and clonezilla. Once you boot a PC from the key you can take an Image of the PC and store it in an external HD. If you connect the bootable drive to another PC and boot it from there, once plugged the external HD you can flash the second PC with the image previously taken. Here the links for downloads: CloneZilla ToxBoot And procedure: Save Image to Disk Restore a Disk Image I hope this helps. BTW...this is my first CodeProject Reply...so, If I have messed up in any way with my instructions, please cut me some slack. :)
JP (Gloucester, UK)
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Windows 7 already has the feature available to do what you want. From control panel, select Backup and Restore and the from the left menu select "Create a system image". You will need a large portable external drive to store the image (preferably a bootable USB Drive). Boot to recovery and select the disk image you want to restore. Alternatively... Create a bootable usb stick with toxboot and clonezilla. Once you boot a PC from the key you can take an Image of the PC and store it in an external HD. If you connect the bootable drive to another PC and boot it from there, once plugged the external HD you can flash the second PC with the image previously taken. Here the links for downloads: CloneZilla ToxBoot And procedure: Save Image to Disk Restore a Disk Image I hope this helps. BTW...this is my first CodeProject Reply...so, If I have messed up in any way with my instructions, please cut me some slack. :)
JP (Gloucester, UK)