Community Newsletter: Q&A: How to back up and restore my PC to the exact same condition it was...
- 8/30/07 3:39 PM
Backing Up
by kkomafo - 8/21/07 1:09 PM In reply to: How to back up and restore my PC to the exact same condition it was... by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
There are a few ways to back up your computer. The first is through a program that allows you to burn copies of all the files, in the state that you burn them. However, this is probably the most beneficial if you already have some knowledge and experience with computers. Secondly, you could either partition your hard drive or get an external hard drive. For partitioning, you can run windows on one partition, and install all your programs on the other partition. Keep in mind that this can slow down your computer a bit, and that you only have to install Windows on one partition so that you can operate through Windows. If you get an external hard drive, you can make a back up through an FTP server, and a program like SyncBack Freeware. Then you can create some back up folders, and choose which directories you'd like to back up. You can set this up so that it automatically backs up certain files on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Lastly, and this is probably what you're least looking for, you can back up files the old fashioned way, which includes creating back ups of your important files. (This includes pictures, Word docs, and other files that you need/want.) However, the problem with this way is that once you forget something, you automatically lose it once you reformat. This is the way a lot of people tend to back up their computers, because it allows them to be somewhat selective of what they'd like to keep, but completely cleans the computer, and restores it to a "like-new" state. The problem is that yes, it takes lots of time, and yes, you can lose things if you forget to back them up. I personally like doing that once in a while, though, to ensure that I get rid of any files I no longer need/want that I've forgotten I have.
Again, slow, complex takes days and again, incomplete...
by ThePoke - 8/21/07 1:45 PM In reply to: Backing Up by kkomafoWhoa - that's one of the WORST "solutions" I've ever heard... and if someone follows your advice and goes postal on you... you deserve it.
Ghost - Put in the CD, turn it on, hit 4 keys - go for lunch. Done.
Your "solution" takes days to weeks and is GUARANTEED to miss. Go dig for original CDs... spend 2 hours doing a full reinstall... then 10-20 hours of download, patch, reboot, repeat (*or a week if you're on dialup internet).... then DAYS digging out driver discs, install CDs and software keys to reinstall and patch all their apps... then the next 2-3 months resetting the stuff about windows and other apps that annoyed them.... then still find out they're missing their address book, favorites, customized settings, etc.
And one of the most ANNOYING things about this method is XP often needs to get on the internet... to update the drivers... to get on the internet! It also often needs to use the hard disc and disk controller... and the internet... before it can access the internet to get the updated drivers for the disk and disk controller. (See a problem here?) Oh - and try to use the web on 16 color 640x480 and internet explorer 4 while you're doing this. FUN, FUN FUN!
And again... NEVER, EVER, NEVER back up over the network... it's slow, increases the chances of problems 10x and puts the ability to backup/restore your system out of your control.
The hardest part about backups is remembering to do them!
by Considerate_Guy - 8/21/07 3:30 PM In reply to: How to back up and restore my PC to the exact same condition it was... by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Bill,
There are certainly several software options currently on the market including Acronis, Norton Ghost, NTBackup, etc. The hardest part is to remember to use them on a consistent basis because what good is a backup if it hasn't been done for a long time? This is where the whole backup industry is missing out on an opportunity, to make backup a "set it and forget it" procedure.
Fortunately (or unfortunately if you are a non-Microsoft supporter), Microsoft is working on a solution for this in the form of a "Windows Home Server" due to be out as early as this fall from several OEMs like HP, Gateway, Iomega and others. It will be a small device that you attach to your network. It will have no keyboard, mouse or monitor, just bays for internal hard disk(s) and USB/Firewire connectors for external HDs, and of course an ethernet connection.
The idea is that you add this device to your network with a simple ethernet cable and then run "connector" software on each PC you want to be part of your Windows Home Server network. From that point on, each PC will perform a daily backup to the server automatically. You can also use the WHS as a shared file server for pictures, music, video, software, documents, etc. and it is stored redundantly on two separate drives. You can also allow remote access to the server, say to retrieve/upload document/pictures/etc. while traveling.
Each night when the backup procedure runs, it looks for any changes and stores those changes on the Windows Home Server. Like I said, it is automatic. Each backup runs without your having to do anything, and you get a little green icon on each PC showing that your network is healthy. Should a PC fail to back up for a few days, or if there are other problems, this icon will change to yellow or red, but otherwise you won't even think about it after awhile.
The backups are stored in such a way that you can get both a full image for any day in the past, or an individual set of files. The server stores a set of "image blocks" and then a list of each block that was part of the backup on a particular night. If something was already backed up, then there is no need for it to be transferred to the server again, thus nightly backups go relatively quickly (after the first ones, of course).
I've been on the beta program for Windows Home Server and it has saved me twice in the last few months. In one case, my son's PC got infected with a virus. All I had to do was restore the complete image from a couple days back and he was back in business. In another case, my daughter's PC had a disk that was nearing capacity, so I bought a larger hard disk, restored the image to the new disk and the problem was solved.
There is lots of information on this "Windows Home Server" on the web if you search around and of course Microsoft has their own marketing info:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx
I suggest you take a look, because the most important thing about backups is that they become something you just do *without* thinking about them. Then *when* (not if) that day comes where you need to restore a complete image (or some accidentally deleted files), they will be right there.
BACKUPS REMEMBERING THEM !!
by pjslgj - 8/24/07 10:32 PM In reply to: The hardest part about backups is remembering to do them! by Considerate_GuyI am a 65 year old Welchman living in Spain .I have just read your article on the above , congratulations. That is the first time I have been able to read a technical article and understad it completley . Have you any idea when these products will be available ?
Once more many thanks .
PJ.
HP MediaSmart servers... possible ship date of 9/15?
by Considerate_Guy - 8/27/07 12:06 PM In reply to: BACKUPS REMEMBERING THEM !! by pjslgjAn unconfirmed report says that the HP version of the Windows Home Server may be available as early as Sept. 15.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/windows/hps-windows-home-servers-shipping-sept-15-292304.php
restore your computer the way it was
by mariyajokes - 8/21/07 9:13 PM In reply to: How to back up and restore my PC to the exact same condition it was... by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Hi Bill,
the best way to do this kind of complete system restore would be to get your PC in shape as you like it - install all drivers, programs, updates /patches etc etc - once the system is running stable and virus-and spyware free - it is time to take a system snapshot using a recovery tool like Norton Ghost (available from Symantec). Ghost will create a complete system image which will help you restore either your complete system very quickly and painlessly or even restore individual files.
The Ghost image files can be copied to another partition on your hard drive or an external hard drive (preferably) - if you do not have an external hard drive, then you can burn on DVDs though you'll need a bunch of them if you have quite a lot of data on your hard disk.
I have successfully used Ghost on dozens of computers - both for a complete system installation as well as system restore and on almost all occasions the process has been smooth, quick and painless. What's more you can even restore to a system other than your original configuration !! (but you'll have to install the proper drivers for that configuration if that is different from the one you made the Ghost image on) !!
Good luck.
regards
J
QOTW081707 Bus Answer
by bus - 8/24/07 11:24 AM In reply to: How to back up and restore my PC to the exact same condition it was... by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Question
I have read many articles on backing up your computer, but I have never seen an article that tells me how to do what I would like to do most, and that is to restore my computer to the exact same condition it was in before my hard-drive went belly-up! Well, I should say, to restore it to the state it was in at the last back-up.
I definitely do not want to have to reinstall Windows, download all of the "patches," get all the drivers, etc., etc.. What I really want to do is to keep a back-up of *everything* so I can put *everything* back the way it was. I have tried a "restore" before, but was not successful and had to go through the above tedious procedure.
I will bet you that almost all computer users would like to know how to do this, and the articles I have seen are not too clear on whether you can even do it, and if you can't, why not?
--Submitted by: Bill L.
Answer
A few ways to do this;
1. RAID1, mirrored drives (can be hard to setup and keep working)
2. Tape (pricey and slow)
3. ISO image onto DVD (most computers come able to do this but the media may fail)
4. Drive Cloning of 2 hard-drives (commercially available kits)
Everyone of these methods has draw backs and unknowns. Because the object here is not to have to reload the OS, to have “everything back the way it was”, and the focus of the topic is hard-drive failure that leaves RIAD1 and “Drive Cloning” as the options to review. Both methods require 2 hard-drives, installation skills, and are testable with low risk of data loss. Drive Cloning is just a copy of your drive onto a second hard-drive. That means you would have 2 hard-drives with the same data in the same layout on both drives and you could take out the hard-drive that’s in the computer and swap it with the copied hard-drive making “everything back the way it was” (to restore it to the state it was in at the last backup). RAID1or mirrored drives, is just 2 drives running together with an interface that mirrors the data to both hard-drives. If a RAID hard-drive fails you could then use the remaining hard-drive making “everything back the way it was”(to restore it to the state it was just before the one RAID hard-drive failed) except there would be only one drive until you replaced the defective one and then restored the RAID.
Which method is the best fit for you is a judgment call. Personal experience leads me to go with “Drive Cloning” because I see hard-drive failure (end of life) as a given. The RAID system uses 2 identical hard-drives. Hard-drives that are of good quality tend to have the same usable life. If one drive fails the other is soon to follow. So if a hard-drive fails, the RAID must be rebuilt quickly and with my tendency to procrastinate I fear the other drive would also fail before I did anything. Therefore I would go with the “Drive Cloning” approach. Which is well documented as a CNET Weekend Project titled “How to punch up your Portable”, sub title “Upgrade Your Hard drive”. Go here
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-11381_7-5506183-3.html?tag=nav .
There is an info link on the page to Apricorn, a company that makes what they call hard-drive upgrade kits. Don’t worry just because the Weekend Project is for portables such as a laptop, Apricorn sells kits that will work with desktops too but you may find you need to buy the hard-drive yourself. Don’t like Apricorn’s products, try software like Norton Ghost or Acornis True Image, go here and see what cable I have used
http://reviews.cnet.com/storage-adapters/sabrent-usb-2535-storage/4864-3014_7-32107412.html?ctype=msgid&messageSiteID=7&messageID=2315216&cval=2315216&tag=uolst .
After you view the info from the Weekend Project titled “How to punch up your Portable”, I recommend that you read the CNET Community Newsletter Archive “Getting serious about backing up your data, October 13, 2006" (at the minimum read the winning answer and the honorable mentions). Go here
http://reviews.cnet.com/4002-7600_7-6651881.html .
The advice there will help supplement the Drive Cloning process into a complete recovery system.
Combining the RAID and Drive Cloning process would be more complete although due to cost you might as well have 2 computers and sync them. That’s a little over kill but it does cover the bases. The biggest pitfall of other backup systems is, do they work? You never know until you have a crash and then use them. That’s a little late to discover if they work. With the RAID and Drive Cloning processes you can test before a crash by doing some hard-drive swapping. Keep in mind that for the most part any backup system is just an insurance policy you hope you never have to use. Therefore I would go with just the “Drive Cloning” approach to keep cost and hassle down. Cautions, you still need to keep and make backups of your working files (pictures, documents, and home movies).
Another additional step, with a second drive as your fail safe backup, you could get and test one of those external USB hard drive backup system. Find one with a software package that does the whole system. Go here to see one I have worked with
http://reviews.cnet.com/hard-drives/iomega-external-black-series/4864-3186_7-31120028.html?ctype=msgid&messageSiteID=7&messageID=2128769&cval=2128769&tag=uolst .
Once you feel you have it working test it by erasing some test files and then do a restore. If that works you can take it a step further and erase a key file or if you are brave the whole drive and then do the restore again. If it works you can set the USB hard drive backup system to perform backups automatically. The USB hard drive backup system keeps your current work files backed up and you would keep the cloned hard-drive in a safe place ready to be installed should the computer’s hard-drive fail.
More thoughts.
Computers don’t come with these systems as a normal package because most computers are obsolete before the components fail. With the current trend towards larger and larger hard-drives computer users may see more early hard-drive failures which may lead to computers coming packaged with aggressive dual backup systems factory direct. Until that happens users need to patch together and understand their own backup plan and systems.
In response to “not too clear on whether you can even do it, and if you can't, why not?”. Cloning of a drive’s data and system software is really a form of coping software. Cloning of software is a gray area due to pirating issues. The software industry has the view “If cloning was easy who would ever buy another piece of software when it can just be copied”. Because of this view software programs come with built in defense systems to deter pirating. These defenses may also cause problems for disk cloning, backup systems, and some types of programs such as anti-virus and game software. I found that the anti-virus programs I use never seem to get past a conventional backup restore operation. After the restore, the computer and its system software work but the anti-virus program always seems to get damaged. A reinstall of the anti-virus program fixes this. I believe you will find that disk cloning will avoid this problem but keep in mind that you will need to re-clone the drive after every software update and that is where the “ you can't, why not” part comes in and the “not too clear”. The cost and time consumption factors make any holistic push button restore backup system for the most part *mythical*. What I have presented here is a “Best Fit Approach”, not 100% solution.
Final pondering on the search for *A Holistic Push Button Restore Backup System*.
As users store more and more of their stuff in magnetic binary code data storage devices, the storage device will be viewed as so much more important than the computer/device used to access it. This is the trend that now is a key process being built into operating systems. This is the era of the mass data storage device which is being accompanied by the “Holistic Push Button Restore Backup System” era. Products like HP’s MediaSmart Server and Data Robotic’s Drobo are just some of the industries’ offerings to the call.
Backup!
by onlinebackup - 8/24/07 5:02 PM In reply to: QOTW081707 Bus Answer by busI got three word for you...
The Online Backup
http://www.theonlinebackup.com
It worked for me....more than once!
how would you do it with no High speed internet acess
by bus - 8/24/07 6:50 PM In reply to: Backup! by onlinebackupI have had times where only my backup dial up is working. How would I down load 160 GB of HDD image? Very very slowly.
I would consider this as an additional layer of protection for non-private data or in the of a nature disaster.
I prefer having a loaded HDD ready to go.
Bird in the hand as apposed to bird in the bush.
You are absolutely right.
by Cadillac84 - 8/28/07 7:06 AM In reply to: how would you do it with no High speed internet acess by busIf we had had a clone of the drive made recently before the failure, we could have swapped the drive out in the tool-less Dell Optiplex chassis and been back in business in about 15 minutes and that's allowing five minutes to clean dust bunnies out of the computer!
I :heart: Apricorn's EZ Gig II
I just did this (EZ Gig II) on three drives!
by Cadillac84 - 8/28/07 7:03 AM In reply to: QOTW081707 Bus Answer by busI voted for your answer because I just did the Apricorn Image method on three drives with absolute success and I'm embarrassed to tell you how quickly the whole thing was over. It took longer to drive to the site than it did to clone the drives.
Why did I do that? How did I just happen to have the Apricorn EZ Gig II software?
Well, I read the laptop article and I decided to replace the hard drive in my laptop and keep the current drive as a backup. So I bought the Apricorn "kit" with the little enclosure for my new 2.5" drive and the cables and EZ Gig II CD.
Before I even got a chance to try it out, I got a call from a customer who had a drive failure. It was "deader-n-a-doornail" so we cried about the fact that she had not been backing up her data and blah, blah, blah. We found a data recovery firm and sent the bad drive off to them with prayers.
Next thing that happens is the data recovery folks tell us they are looking for an identical drive (same firmware and date code) from which they will remove working parts (servo motor and heads?) to get the bad drive running just long enough to grab the data -- hopefully.
There were two computers bought at the same time and each had two 80 gig drives. One drive had failed; maybe the other drives were candidates!
So, I bought new drives (SATA 300 even though the existing drives were SATA 150) and put one new (blank) drive in place of the removed bad drive. Procedure then was:
1) boot to Setup to tell BIOS about drive configurations
2) boot to EZ Gig II CD
3) click on "Clone"
4) click on "Start"
5) accept defaults making sure the source drive is the older one and the target drive is the newer one -- easy to do if brands are different such as replacing a Seagate with a Maxtor.
6) confirm choices
7) Start
8) eight minutes later, clone is complete.
9) shut down
10) remove older drive
11) put newer drive in "Drive 0" position
12) boot to Setup and tell BIOS only one drive
13) reboot and test
14) put old drive in bag and prepare for shipment
Then, because I wasn't sure the older drive would be what was needed, I decided to go ahead and repeat the procedure for both drives in the other computer.
I now have three identical drives which have been cloned and both computers have new drives in them.
The lost data? Jury is still out.
Shortest clone time? Eight minutes.
Longest clone time? About fifteen minutes because there was a reading error for one cluster on the drive and I clicked retry several times before I decided to try "Ignore" and the rest was smooth.
EZ Gig II works with any drive connection. That is, you can clone from an internal drive to an internal drive or from internal to USB or from USB to internal. If you can boot to CD, you're in great shape! If you can't boot to CD, you'll have to install the EZ Gig software on your computer and that's less fun but it still works.
My new idea is to get a USB drive which must be the size of the my largest internal drive (or larger) and make a clone and put it on the shelf. Each time I clone, my previous backup is destroyed and a new one created. If that concerns me, I will use two USB drives and rotate them.
Cost? Well, the kit I bought (and I haven't cloned my laptop yet!) cost me about $60 USD. I think you can buy the software independent of the kit, but I'm not sure. A 500 GB USB drive can be had for around $120 and maybe less. So, two 500 GB drives and the "kit" is right at $300 USD and I can clone any drive from any computer at any time.
If you clone an 80 GB drive using a 500 GB USB drive, the partition will be only 80 GB (or you can select "proportional" and make the new partition 500 GB). You cannot put multiple backups/clones onto a single drive. Each cloning destroys everything else on the drie.
However, if you have two or three partitions on your existing drive, the clone will be all of the partitions. For example, my clone included the Dell Diagnostic partition as well as the Windows XP NTFS partition.
You can do some other things with EZ Gig II, but I haven't tried that yet.
EZ Gig II does what I wish Ghost could do. Actually Ghost COULD do it until they changed it. My experience with Symantec is they love to take your favorite software and come out with a new improved version that you won't like. Oh, well....
THANKS, you made it worth all the effort of the
by bus - 8/28/07 3:52 PM In reply to: I just did this (EZ Gig II) on three drives! by Cadillac84answer that I posted and thanks for the detailed reply.
"My experience with Symantec is they love to take your favorite software and come out with a new improved version that you won't like. Oh, well....", I feel the same way about them, well said.
Does the EZ GIG II work with Dells CERC Raid and SATA
by Strangebuttrue - 8/28/07 6:23 PM In reply to: I just did this (EZ Gig II) on three drives! by Cadillac84Thanks for the post on the EZ GIG II. I am trying to clone a drive on a Dell SC 420 which has CERC RAID and SATA drives. Do you know if it will work in that config. The SATA drives seem to be a problem for many of the recovey tools. Ditto for the CERC Raid.
ez gig ll
by tincup138 - 8/29/07 4:07 AM In reply to: I just did this (EZ Gig II) on three drives! by Cadillac84I upgraded my laptop hard drive with ez gig. could'nt get it to work. After calling ez gig at least 5 times with no results by trial and error I turned my norton off and everything worked by the book.
EZ Gig II
by Roger Benson - 3/13/09 11:55 AM In reply to: I just did this (EZ Gig II) on three drives! by Cadillac84I tried to replace a 100GB Drive with a WD 320G. I bought the EZ GIG II software and drive case. I installed the software, followed the directions for cloning and copied the 100G drive to the 320G. After that, I swapped the drives and rebooted. Nothing - no bootable media found. I repeated everything a second time after formatting the 320G drive. Same result. I reformatted the 320 Drive again, installed it and setup Vista from scratch. No problems - the new drive works fine. Wish I had your luck.
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