Re: OT: Hard Drive Backup Tools?

Retrospect will perform "open file" backups...in fact I just upgraded to 7.5
and tried it and it works great! I started out with Retrospect 5.6 that came
with an external USB Hard Drive and upgraded from there. I feel its worth
the money especially now that version 7.5 has "wizards" and one that
specifically address backing up "My Documents". Recovery is niffty too!

Why don't you try the 30 day free trial at http://www.emcinsignia.com/try/
If you like it, it cost $119 for the downloadable version and a little more
for the physical version. See if it does what you want.

Tore

"Mark Dunakin" <md@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:pvUFf.25367$JT.1038@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
OK, I probably should of made things a little more clear, as the problem
that has "always" come up with backing up, is precicely the MyDocuments
folder bit.
You can "not" back it up while XP is running.
And of course, how can you back it up if it isn't running.
In otherwords, like when I used to do backups, I always thought, hey, my
main concerns
are the MyDocs folder and LW and a couple of other things, but not realy
needing
the whole drive backed up, just the created file I've made to the
computer,
like email and LW stuff or Photoshop things or, well, you get the point :)
Here's where the problem comes in, every time I would simply "try" can
backup the MyDocs folder,
so I wouldn't have to digg allllllll over the place searching and
searching just to find certain files for
every little app that saves it's files automatically to some hidden
place burried in amoungst the MyDocs
sub folders, when I went to do the back up, there are ALWAYS stupid
files that are being used by the
system "somewhere, who knows where?) that can't get copied, and thus,
stupid Windows (XP Pro)
simply tells you that it can't back said file up and then the ONLY
option you are left with is, to click
the OK button which promptly ends the copying instead of asking you, would
you like to continue backing up the rest of the files.
So, then you're stucck trying to figure out which files actually got
backed up and which
didn't and then you just get fed up and "manually" go through ALLL the
foolders and
sub-folders attempting to track down any files that you "think???"
mnight be needed files for saving.
And of course, I don't need to tell you what ends up happening later.
But I will, you descover that you didn't back some needed file up and
you are screwed.
LW, is actually the easiest thing on my system to back up, because
NewTek did things right,
like everyone else should do with their software, but for some screwy
reason never do,
and that's to pretty much keep EVERYTHING all contained in one folder,
the LW folder.
All you need then, is to grab the configs and save those too.
Or for that matter, keep them all in the LW folder like I do these days
and you're good to go.

All I want to be able to do, is copy the whole C Drive
over to one of my other drives and I'd be the happy camper.

I don't have a USB thingy that big enough to do what you say.
And like I say, I'd rather be able to just backup the whole drive,
as that way I wouldn't have to worry about where files are just to back
them
up and I could then later take my time finding any files that certain
ask me for later.
that's a lot easier then searching for files that I have no clue what
I'm searching for.
This way, when I install an app (after a reformat) and it wants some
kind of files for something,
I can just do a search and find my saved files that match up and do a
drag and copy right
over the newly installed files and be right back to where I was before
the format.

Uhg, this sounded like far more of a mess then I ever wanted to admit
to, but that's how it is LOL

I'll do a search for that RoboCopy thing and the other one that Tore
mentioned and see what I see.
I know though, that as much as I used to think I liked Norton System
works, I now realize just how
much that things slows down my whole system and I don't need any more
problems then I already have.

Thanx and of course, I'm still open to any more suggestions?

................md :)



Steve Reeves wrote:

Hi Mark,

I take the simple approach for backups. I'm an XP user and 90% of all
my data is stored by default in My Documents.

Some data like email data, is stored elsewhere and I use a script or a
small app (like the free Mozbackup) to create a backup of this data
in My Documents also.

I then copy across the whole lot to a USB drive that I only switch on
for backups. I store several backups on the drive at once.

The upside is that this is easy and cheap.

The downside is that the backups are not compressed (although if I
cared and had the time I could compress the whole "My Documents"
folder with WinZip easy enough). Also, the backups are always full
backups - no incremental backups going on here!

Works for me, simple and easy for both restore and backup. I backup
once a week which is OK for me, maybe not quite so convenient if you
are doing it more than once a day - but as I say you can script most
if not all of it using Robocopy or something.

HTH
Steve

Mark Dunakin wrote:

I don't know where else to ask, so I thought I'd ask here as I'm sure
others have had to
back up their drives to some other drive or whatever and my main
issue is with backing
up the C Drive as you can't just copy it over to another drive, since
it's in use at the time.
I currently use Norton's Ghost, but am wondering if there might be a
better sollution, as I feel
(now) that Norton seems to be making itself a resource hog and I'd
like to get away from it, if I can?

Yes, I did a search, but came up with a zillion finds and I don't
want to have to go through all
of those and read up on every single one, if someone else already has
some good
experiences with what they think is better and uses less resources?

Thanx for any info and help with this..................md :)
And feel free to email me if you think it's better,
but I'd suspect that other's here would bennifit from this type of
info too.




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MD arts
Mark Dunakin
md@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.md-arts.com


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