Backup/Recovery software for WinXP

[brewston]

Hiya

Can anyone recommend some backup/recovery software to make an image of my Windows partition on my server and recover it should my HDD fail ? ( I mean *when* it fails )

I played around with PING but it took hours to backup an 8GB partition to external USB drive and then when i went to test recover it claimed it could not find the image (and the documentation is rubbish) I've not tried anything else since

Free software would be useful

Thanks

[perfessor101]

I use Acronis True Image which is reasonably priced ...

it will do a 'bare metal' restore ... and includes a bartpe plugin ...

if you have a side by side linux install you can pipe the NTFS partition image to gzip and compress it to a file ;-)
or ntfsclone ...

thefreecountry.com has a page listing "Free Hard Disk Backup / Restore and Image / Cloning Utilities" http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilit...andimage.shtml

which may have more software for you to try to see if it fits your purposes

Hope this helps,
Bobby

[brewston]

Thanks ! I will take a look through the list, it appears pretty exhaustive

[doc]

If you have a Seagate or Maxtor drive you can use Maxblast

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.js...00dd04090aRCRD

Its a cut down version of Acronis but only works with those drives.

I manually image mine with Maxblast every few weeks to both of my recording drives just in case.

[brewston]

Hello Doc

How are you doing ?

It is a Seagate - can it only restore to Seagate/Maxtor ? Can it restore to any size drive ? That seems to be a common restriction...

[davephan]

I use Ghost version 9 and version 10 to image and recover on two different Windows XP Pro computers. Ghost is a reliable way to recover Windows computers. I started with Ghost version 3. With version 3, sometimes the recoveries would fail. Recoveries with Ghost version 7 or later are reliable.

I have just started to use Acronis as a second imaging product. I haven't tried a recovery yet.

I have successfully recovered using PING, but maybe the recoveries are not reliable. Without reliable recoveries, the product is pretty useless.

It helps to test your image recoveries. If you have a spare drive, you can remove the normal boot drive, then apply the image to the spare drive. It helps if you have the drives on a tray so that you don't have to open up the case and move drives around to test the recoveries.

I plan to test a recovery with Acronis soon. If it works, I will use both Ghost and Acronis to periodically image the SageTV computer. The Acronis Workstation version has a feature which claims to be able to recover to different hardware. The Acronis Workstation version costs a little more, plus you have to pay a bit more for the extra feature to recover onto different hardware. If that differential hardware recovery works, then you would not have to keep a spare identical system board on hand. Acronis also works with Windows 7 64 bit, Ghost does not (in case you upgrade the OS in the future, you don't want to have to re-buy the imaging software that works with Windows 7).

I plan to buy an identical system board anyway. I will use the spare system board on a general purpose web browsing computer. Since the general purpose computer is also used regularly, then the spare replacement system board is a "known good" replacement part, instead of a untested spare part sitting on a shelf.

You should image to a drive that is a secondary drive on the SageTV computer. Creating images and recovering will be faster than using a USB hard drive directly. Copy the image files onto a USB hard drive for your backup image copy. Do not use DVDs, either for imaging or storing the image files. I have experienced failed recoveries using DVDs, even with multiple DVD copies.

Dave

[doc]

Originally Posted by brewston

Hello Doc

How are you doing ?

It is a Seagate - can it only restore to Seagate/Maxtor ? Can it restore to any size drive ? That seems to be a common restriction...

Hiya, surviving the new year blues! Hope you're ok too.

Yes unfortunately it can only restore to Seagate or Maxtor drives, so I make sure my system drive is either of those - it doesn't care what size though. It does have some limitations, but you can't have everything when its free. I have 2 Samsung recording drives and create a backup image onto one of these, then copy it to the other just in case.

I've debated buying the full Acronis True Image software a few times but this does all I need it to.

Oh yes - and its quick, does my C drive in about 2 minutes

[perfessor101]

One time I was going to reinstall XP so I installed UltraVNC on the system
and then I made an Acronis Image (Acronis True Image 9.0 ... a few versions ago) and then started on a new clean install of XP MCE ...
after getting XP MCE installed with drivers and Windows Updates ...
I installed VMWare on the new XP MCE ...
created a Windows XP Pro VM and booted it from the Acronis Recovery CD and recovered my old XP install from my NAS placing it into the XP Pro VM ...
when it completed the recovery of my old install to the XP Pro VM ... I then changed the cd image in the XP Pro VM to my windows XP install cd and performed a Repair ...
after the Repair I booted the XP Pro VM into windows XP Pro and UltraVNC'd into the XP Pro VM and finished configuring the new system and transferring files back and forth.

(I wanted to make sure the new install was completely working before saying goodbye to my old install, still needing some of it's software running)

I'm not sure if that would count as different hardware .... doing the repair from the XP CD helped deal with the changed hardware and I was told as long as I didn't install VMTools it wouldn't ask for reactivation.

So if ever asked if I do stupid things ...
Bobby

[freedml]

ntbackup is built-in to xp and works well

[MattHelm]

For my system backups I use Macrium Reflect FREE Edition:

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

I have the full version for "my" machine, and then the free one for all my servers. And yes, I had to use it at least once, and it worked fine.