Sage 7, Win 7, System Images?

[Diego Garcia]

Despite the fact that the only application running on it is Sage 7, I keep having problems with my Win7 (32 bit Ultimate) system. If it's not some system file getting corrupted (currently MSVCRT.DLL), it's a problem with a file table, or some other gotcha. Overall it's not that big a deal, but having to do significant surgery every few months is annoying.

So while I was contemplating doing yet another reinstall of Windows 7 today it occurred to me that a smarter way to handle this would be to get the system disk configured correctly, make a system image of it, and then when it gets messed up restore from the image and move on.

Mulling this over I see a couple of issues. First, right now I have Sage installed to the system drive (in C:\Program Files...). Obviously I don't want to replace the current contents of the Sage program directory with an image I made a couple of months ago.

I think Sage is structured so that I could copy the directory to a temporary location, restore the system image, and then copy the temporary sage directory back on top of the "restored" system drive. Would that work? Does Sage store any information outside its installation directory?

Another idea would be to install Sage onto a drive other than the system drive. I've never done that, though, and don't know if Sage writes "state" information to the system drive (e.g., registry, user data area, etc.).

I'd be interested in any feedback or experience people may have had doing something similar. And yes, I realize I probably should invest the time to figure out >>why<< my system drive keeps getting messed up (it's a new SSD, BTW). But, frankly, I spend too much time mucking with the hardware Sage runs on anyway (I had to rebuild the entire system recently), and I really just want this to be a "TV appliance" .

[davephan]

You could image your C drive with SageTV installed on it. Save the image files to another drive. It is possible to take full, differential, and incremental images. In addition, you could use Syncback to periodically copy the SageTV folder contents to another drive. You could setup Syncback to copy each day of the week to a separate folder. You could then recover the image, then pick which SageTV copy to restore. If you have enough disk for the images and backup file copies, you can decide how frequent to create the images and backup copies.

I take images about every month or two. It might be a better idea to take full images every month and setup incremental images everyday. I don't do SageTV folder copies, but I might start copying it every day, keeping a week to a month of file copy generations, depending on how much disk is used.

It may also be a good idea to image with a second imaging product, even if it's free like Clonezilla. That way you have another redundant method to recover your system quickly.

Dave

[Skirge01]

I assume you're also investigating the root cause of the corruption? It sounds like a failing hard drive or, possibly, bad RAM.