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Re: Backup--OT

Bill,
This sounds great. But I'm confused about one thing. If the image file is
bootable, what's doing with the CD? You say, "in case of disaster." Meaning
what? That your regular hard drive won't boot? I don't fully trust booting
from a CD (have had problems: the Lenovo Thinkpad I have doesn't have an
internal CD drive, so have to use an external USB CD drive and change the
boot order, but it doesn't always work--something about the unreliability
of non-powered USB CD drives, I think.

So why can't you boot from the bootable image? And how specifically would
you go from invoking SP on another computer to getting a drive to insert in
the now defunct computer?


Thanks so much,
Harry
Harry, I am totally with you in the idea that the only Windows backup
worth having is a complete bootable one. However, I do it differently:
automated and in software. I use ShadowProtect. This creates a bootable
image file (I split it into 640MB segments) that is incrementable and
automatable (I do a full backup every week; an incremental every 3 hours).

So how do you get a bootable drive out of this? In case of disaster, you
boot up with a ShadowProtect CD (or simply invoke ShadowProtect on another
computer) and restore your image to your target hard drive.


The result will be a perfect duplicate.
I have done this several times with complete success. ShadowProtect is the
only such system that has ever worked for me. (Acronis is not a patch on
it.) I have complete confidence in it.

Are there any gotchas? I would say that you have to watch the numerous
hidden partitions (more and more!) that modern computers are beginning toi
have. (For example there are seven partitions on my plain vanilla Dell XPS
15 late 2013. Why so many? Heaven knows.) Once or twice, I have lost one
of these partitions, but it has not affected me in any visible way.

SSDs are great but they can benefit from maintenance and they do in the
end fail.

Why not use both? Continue to use the hardware solution but only once
every couple of months? Meanwhile use the software solution regularly. You
will then have the convenience of up-to-the-minute backups (as long as the
backup drive is connected of course).

These images are complete total, total, total duplicates of your hard
drive state. There is no need to worry about losing any value whatever.


NB: This is just one user's experience over the past few years.


At 17/04/2014 22:11, you wrote:
I have a technical question that maybe one or more of you would be so
kind as to help with.

I've been bitten by disaster too many times not to be very concerned with
backup. I have now what is the ideal solution, except for one flaw: I
take the SSD drive out of my Lenovo Thinkpad (fairly easy to do, but
requires unscrewing one screw), and put it with the backup drive into a
toaster-like drive-duplicator from Aluratek that duplicates the SSD,
sector by sector, onto the backup drive. The result is a completely
substitutable, bootable dupe of my SSD (which I then replace in my Thinkpad).


The only problem is that I can't do this, of course, as a scheduled task.
I am doing physical drive duplication because via software, you can't
produce a bootable drive. But is making a clone image good enough? I have
tried Acronis, EaseUS, and Carbonite for making "images," but they aren't
bootable. As I understand it (through a glass, darkly), you boot your
system some other way, then "restore" the image. It's all smoke and
mirrors to me. I don't trust "booting some other way," even though the
Thinkpad has a system recovery partition on the main drive (i.e., my
SSD). So, am I being a scaredy-cat? Should I rely on images and just "get
over it" re my bafflement at what the restore process is? Would the end
result be not just the return of my data files but of all my OS settings,
including the registry?

A final thought: is the image, like a virtual machine, just one file that
you only need a running computer to activate?


Thanks for the hand-holding.