Re: Old laptop hard drive. Ideas?

Hey Rod,

xxclone looks good but how do you restore from a failed drive with it? You said you use trueimage and you made a bootable CD, what is on the bootable CD? Does it have networking to see the image on another machine? I don't know if image software packages come with the necessary boot disk to be able to see a usb device or a network share.




"Rod Speed" <rod.speed.aaa@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:6thh87FasnfcU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dave wrote:

Thanks everyone for your ideas. Unfortunately I have never backed up.
Sad but true. Even more sad is I think my inaction is quite common.

Here is what I am thinking of doing. Purchase a USB external
harddrive and do a monthly full backup and daily differentials
of all my data. If the laptop drive fails I will reload the OS,
reinstall my programs and restore my data.

Since the laptop only has USB 1.1, it would be quicker
to backup to your desktop system over the lan.

It would be nice to either ghost to a new drive now and replace the
old one but as Arno points out, the new drive may be no more reliable.

Yeah, that makes no sense for that reason. In fact the old
drive may actually be a little more reliable than a new one
just because its survived the infant mortality time.

I still have the problem of keeping a backup of new data.

How can you update a entire bootable drive image?

There are a few systems like xxclone that can do that auto.

I would have to do continual reimaging which sounds overly
labor intensive and I don't really have a method to do that.

xxclone will do that auto. Its pretty slow the first time but quite
quick to do the updates, moving only what has changed.

The only way I can ghost over my current drive is to remove it from
the laptop and attach it to my desktop machine with adaptors.

You should be able to image to your desktop over the lan.
True Image can do that and ghost likely can too.

I only have dos floppy based ghost.

Its a dinosaur way past its useby date now. Acronis True Image
leaves it for dead and doesnt cost much and is excellent for
backups and for restoring the image if the original drive dies.

To answer another question, the laptop does not have
a dvd burner. My desktop does and I can map to it.
Should I burn a dvd with a bootable image?

I dont bother myself. I keep the images on hard drives and just make
a bootable CD to run True Image from if the original drive dies. Boot
that in the laptop with the replacement drive in it and restore from
the image on the desktop over the lan in that config.

Would that save me having to reload OS and programs.

Yep.

I can also save an image to a USB hard drive.

Yes, but that isnt going to be that fast with just USB 1.1 in the laptop.

Again, my ghost cannot do this so I would have to invest
in more feature rich imaging software. Should buy Acronis?

Yep, I think you should. It isnt that expensive.

I could use a USB flash ram device but for the same money I can get
a hard drive based unit much larger to do both my laptop and my desktop.

Yep, but dont forget that you only have USB 1.1 on the laptop.

Also I have heard of reliability issues with the "Jump drives".

Yep, but that isnt normally a huge problem because you usually see
the drive failure when doing a backup, not when trying to restore from one.
And they are now so cheap that you can have more than one too.

I just got a 16GB for $18 and an 8GB for $8. Much cheaper than hard drives.


.

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