Backing up your system drive to another hd

[bboldschool]

What's the best way to do this..I would like to back up my entire system drive to another drive for back up purposes..just in case it fails..I am using XP home? Can you do it in XP or is there software to do this for you?

[cgrey]

There are a few programs you can use for this.

Norton Ghost is a pretty good one.

Drive Image is another.

Either of these will allow you to take an exact 'snapshot' of your existing hard drive, which you can restore at any time.

[bboldschool]

Will Norton Ghost do the same thing as Drive Image? I have access to Norton Ghost..sounds like Drive Image will make an exact copy of your hd..but I was'nt sure if Ghost does that?
Thanks for the advice...

[cgrey]

Yep, they'll both do essentially the same thing.

I use Ghost - it can do a one-to-one copy (if you're copying from one drive or partition to another), and it can create an 'image file', which can be restored through Ghost itself.

[mediahome]

The advantage that Drive Image 7 has over the other drive image products is that it now runs under WinXP and can make a hot image of the system disk that it is running from. No more having to run from a DOS boot diskette to run it like as is the case with Ghost. When runing DI7 under WinXP you now also have access to USB and firewire attached storage devices - a DVD burner for example.

[Mike Young]

I use Ghost and it works good but as suggested by above its kind of cludgy,(Norton used to make superb products) to make life simpler though and I think for all around better performance I suggest this : Partition your drive into at least 2 partitions, one for XP and programs including Sage - I set that partition to 5gb, format that partition using default block size, this will work best for XP and programs. Then format the remainder of the drive and any extra drives that will be used for recordings or other large files with 64K blocks. This way you can QUICKLY make a daily (if you want) image of your important opsys and program files/settings onto a second drive or a removable media.
If you have the other drive online, you could just do an xcopy from a cmd window, you wont get data compression, but xcopy is a very usefull command, you can control the use of it with flags, only write files that are different or dont exist on target ...etc. If you have large drives with big files like I do that can save you some time. I use a batch file full of xcopy comands and other commands to control backups of various directories with various options.
you could set it to run at night even.

[Mike Young]

One point I should metion...as far a I know with Ghost or any other backup solution on XP....you cant restore directly from the backup to a non XP system disk, that means you would have to have your XP cd and install the sytsem, then insert your Ghost CD and do a restore.....thank MS for that... I have heard there are "ways" to create an XP home boot diskette though not officially supported.

[cgrey]

Originally posted by Mike Young
One point I should metion...as far a I know with Ghost or any other backup solution on XP....you cant restore directly from the backup to a non XP system disk, that means you would have to have your XP cd and install the sytsem, then insert your Ghost CD and do a restore.....thank MS for that... I have heard there are "ways" to create an XP home boot diskette though not officially supported.

You don't need an XP system disk to restore an image create by Ghost. It's exactly that, an 'image'. By restoring the image, you are over-writing the partition you're restoring to sector-by-sector.

[Mike Young]

yeah, but what are you going to use to get a XP environment....I am talking about if your system hard drive goes poof! Ghost supports creating emergency disks, but as far as I know still not a full recovery for XP, you MUST build a XP system first, then restore....The Ghost CD is bootable, but you cannot restore XP from that, at least according to Symantec. I have been fortunate enough to never have to try it.

[cgrey]

Originally posted by Mike Young
yeah, but what are you going to use to get a XP environment....I am talking about if your system hard drive goes poof! Ghost supports creating emergency disks, but as far as I know still not a full recovery for XP, you MUST build a XP system first, then restore....The Ghost CD is bootable, but you cannot restore XP from that, at least according to Symantec. I have been fortunate enough to never have to try it.

Create a Ghost boot disk (floppy - can be done from within the Ghost software itself). Boot your system from that floppy. Choose partion -> From Image. Select the partition (or drive) that you want to restore to - it can be a brand new drive, or you could restore over your old data. Select the image file that contains your previous 'backup'. You're restoring your WHOLE partition, sector-by-sector - Operating system and all.

You don't need to start with an XP environment - it's all contained within your backed up image.

I've been doing this to roll brand new (XP and other) systems out to completely 'blank' drives for years.

[Mike Young]

I can see what you mean...it really shouldnt matter what opsystem you boot with since you are restoring sector by sector. when I tried before to greate a Ghost Boot disk, Ghost told me that for XP home, I had to use the XP Home disk to boot. It created recovery disks that contained Ghost, but nothing bootable.

[Opus4]

Just to toss in a little more info... The latest DriveImage, version 7, comes with a boot CD so you could boot from it to do a complete system restore.

Before that, DI also worked in DOS mode, so you would just boot into DOS & run DI to restore everything.

- Andy