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Back up (cont)

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by haylocks 1 view

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A huge thank you to everybody who contributed to my part of the Windows XP backup thread. A great deal of time and effort went into clarifying things for me, and I am very grateful indeed.

I now have Cobian so will have to sit down and think about the precise strategy. I've certainly got the hardware resources to secure stuff (but that's what I thought I had before :-((

Now that I understand the implications of the difference between imaging and backing up I will indeed be splitting off the data from the system backup!

Once again, thanks to everybody :-)))

Richard

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by haylocks

"Now that I understand the implications of the difference between imaging and backing up I will indeed be splitting off the data from the system backup!"

Oh, no, I wont.

"My Documents" is buried inside "Documents and Settings" and, although you can change its location, it doesn't really work neatly. If you move the store to the root of C:\, the resulting tree is a total mess. If you have mirrored discs (as I now have)with a Ghost-ready partition (in my case 80Gb on tthe physical D: drive, not enough for me for an uncompressed Ghost image!), you're using up Ghost space which is a bad idea.

So, I tried moving the store to the root of C:\.

Bad move. It looked so messy, I tried to revert and found I couldn't.

Then decided to use the Gost image from one hour earlier to restore everything to the way it was. Guess what? Ghost refused to restore inside a Windows session, and asked me to re-boot with the Ghost CD in the CD drive, after suggesting that I might want to set, via F2 (BIOS setup) the boot order.

The boot process went straight to Windows, and I was back in a loop which would not let me restore from my mint Image.

There are some four letter words I could use about this, but I wont, here.

Suffice to say, I'll dump Ghost as being unreliable, and use a true backup of my C: drive as a primary recovery vehicle of everythingon C: onto my D: drive, and do a straight copy of my data onto my new external USB 320Gb drive as a secondary source of data recovery.

Some people have said "nothing's perfect" in the back-up arena.

WHY NOT? It cannot be rocket science.

Any comments, please, gratefully received, bearing in mind KISS.

Best regards to all my readers,

Richard

by jeffykins

I've used a lot of backup approaches over the past 20 years. Now, I just use Mozy. It works, and doesn't cost me a dime. They give you a small client app that wakes up every 2 hours or so and does an incremental backup to their servers. They give you 2 Gb+ free for personal use. More space or business use starts at $5 / month. It's pretty easy to configure exactly what you want backed up. Do yourself a favor.

https://mozy.com/ref/VKXPV7

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