Is it safer to put my data in c: drive?

Don't forget to download robocopy first!
Welcome to the forums, Johnhoh

you are welcome. happy computing.

johnhoh said:

wallyinnc said:

Don't forget to download robocopy first!
Welcome to the forums, Johnhoh

Its in my windows/sysem32 so I assumed win7 put it there

I stand corrected. It seems to have become a standard feature from Vista onwards.
Good advice and catch!

Hi All;

For Win7, I bought another internal drive, 500 GB Hitachi SATA. XP is on Disk0, and while in XP I intitialized and formatted the new drive and assigned it letter F: Then installed Win7 on disk1. When I boot to Win7, it reports Win7 on drive c:, XP on drive d: . When I boot to XP, it reports XP on C:, Win7 on F: .

Regarding backup - I am very, very paranoid . I have critical data going back 20 years that I cannot live without, and I also HATE re-installing any OS. Here's what I do:

I have three external drives that I rotate. I use GHOST SS 2.5 to create images of (now two) internal drive(s), about once per month. I rotate the external drives, so that if the system AND the backup target crashes during the backup, I have another copy. One I keep in my car (in case civilization collapses and I have to get out of town fast). One I hide at home. The other is across town at work. I also run Mozy Home, set to backup EVERYTHING including the OS stuff - I like to be sure.

I've been using this system since Win95 days, and I have survived several disasters with zero loss of data and minimal time to restore.

To restore, I just grab the most recent external drive, boot from the GHOST floppy and/or CD, and do the restore. A few hours later the system is back in the state it was in at the time of backup. I then use Mozy to bring back the files that were written since the GHOST backup.

Raargh

Windows 7 Backup Center will back up your selected files and keep a current system image to a primary partition and/or an external drive on a schedule. Just keep your external plugged, set it and forget it.

Another use of the 100mb is that it puts the repair console available at f8 at bootup.

An example of the functionality of both: I was in Panera on my laptop having coffee when the OS would not bootup.

Because I had the 100mb (and didn't have the installer or repair disk) I tapped F8 and ran startup repair repeatedly but it wouldnt' start.

But I keep a copy of my current backup image in a primary partition so all I had to do was F8 into "Recover Using an Image" and it reimaged my HDD from the Primary Recov Partition in the time it took to get another cup of coffee.

@gregrocker;

Thanks!

I've now got four different backups in three different places.

Raargh