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Tell me about it, I had to buy EASUS to get back some irreplaceable photos. Was worth the cost. That thing got like 95% of the stuff back. Amazing. Luckily I hadn't done a 7 time wipe of free space......
glennc
Tell me about it, I had to buy EASUS to get back some irreplaceable photos. Was worth the cost. That thing got like 95% of the stuff back. Amazing. Luckily I hadn't done a 7 time wipe of free space......
glennc
Think about this:
You have your operating system and your personal data on the same partition (C). Everything is working OK.
Feb 1: you make an image of C (the entire partition).
Feb 5: you do a lot of work on your PC, maybe scanning in 200 new pictures or doing your tax returns.
Feb 10: your operating system becomes unstable and System Restore doesn't help. No problem, you've got the image you made Feb 1.
So you restore the image.
Well, you just lost all that work you did on Feb 5. You are back to where you were on Feb 1.
That's an example of how you can become complacent, thinking an image will always bail you out. You've got to stay on your toes.
I agree with you 100%. I have had "verified" images fail for reasons I never could figure out. So a Automated program such as "GoodSync" for personal data backup is the best way in my opinion. I generally separate my personal data from the partition where the OS resides as much as possible. In other words, I have separate partitions for "My Documents", "Application Data", and even one for the pagefile.sys. This keeps my OS clean, unfragmented, and manageable when making an backup image of the OS for recovery purposes. A key point her would be, although the process of backing up the data is automated, do not automate with respect to scheduling the backup process. This could allow backing up of malware or viruses. Before backing up data or creating a intermittent image, the first step is to insure a clean computer.
Has anyone played around with Acronis True Image for disk imaging? Was wondering if anyone had a decent review of disk imaging software.
dTonic
I own Acronis True Image 2010 for my home computers. I found it available at NewEgg once for $23.99 and it works well. With that said, I have also used Macrium Reflect (free) and EaseUS ToDoBackup (free) for test boxes at work and both of them work well also. The feature I like with Acronis is called Try & Decide...so you turn on T&D and then you can make changes, install stuff, etc...and at the end you can choose to discard the changes or keep them. (99% of the time I discard). The 1 time I tried to commit them, it wrecked my machine and I had to restore a backup....so I won't ever commit the changes again.
For me personally, I have an 80GB SSD for my OS, apps and games. I have a 1TB drive for downloads, scratch space and image backups in the machine. My actual data is stored on a server, which has a second hard drive installed which replicates the data every 6 hours. And then I connect 2 external drives regularly and backup the data using robocopy to my external drives and then typically keep 1 or both of them offsite in the event of a fire, theft or other home disaster.
So, I often install the OS, activate it and Windows Update patch it and make 1 image. Then I further image about once per month. Thus, in the event of an issue I can go back to the latest 1 month image or go back to the clean vanilla image in the case of a major problem.
Last edited by pparks1; 12 Jul 2010 at 15:11.
That's a nice setup for back, indeed. Sounds too expensive for me. I think I'm heading towards a second HDD for mirroring the data partitions on the working drive, then I can just syncronize the data from HDD to HDD. I also want to keep the second drive inaccessible until I chose to access it for Syncing. This ought to keep the viruses from the second drive.
dTonic
The feature I like with Acronis is called Try & Decide...so you turn on T&D and then you can make changes, install stuff, etc...and at the end you can choose to discard the changes or keep them. (99% of the time I discard). The 1 time I tried to commit them, it wrecked my machine and I had to restore a backup....so I won't ever commit the changes again.
That is funny.
Hello to all,
Thank everyone for joining in the discussion. I still haven't decided.
But I have a more immediate issue. I have tried to do a Windows backup with System Image and so far it has failed twice. Double checked settings and reset backup to search for devices to backup to. On the second try I got a 0x8007002 Error. I rebooted again and did a create system image by itself. It did it without a hitch. Now I'm attempting to do a backup without the system image. As I'm sitting here it just failed twice, almost immediately after starting.
Now a word of background. It appears that Backup wants to store on the root of the my E: drive. That is where it always did it before. The backup from prior to doing the multiple reformats was copied back to a Folder, not back to root where it was originally. I don't know but could this be a problem?????
Endeavor to persevere.
glennc
Hello geek,
Thanks for the time. I agree that there is more out there. Thanks for the vote of confidence on that product. Will review after doing a complete clean install of the OS.
Take care.
glennc