I was wondering if any of you uber geeks could offer some advice please.
I have an SSD that I recently had to replace, I lost all the data and settings, I have the main stuff backed up. It's on a 120gb so will fit easily onto one of the other two drives and NAS for safety.
It has taken a decade to get the setup back as it was, I was wondering if there was a simple way of mirroring the whole drive so that next time I don't have to install everything and keep the serials handy.
What I have noticed is no one seems to say if you have to reload windows again then mirror, it seems mad to reload windows a a new drive, can you just copy the image over?
Win7 btw.
Cheers
We used to use a piece of software called ghost to do stuff like that. However that is a while back and I see that Norton now own it, have wrecked it a bit and are discontinuing it. It might be a starting point for a search though.
http://www.acronis.eu/homecomputing/products/trueimage/
The new drive comes bundled with Acronis, so I will look into that. The instructions are not great though, as it suggests it is for taking data from an old drive onto the new.
I will looks.
Cheers
I use this software and it runs very nicely in the back ground, mirroring critical areas of my hard drive and doing normal backups for the rest.
http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbpro.html
I used to use Acronis, but Macrium Reflect has a free version and it's even better.
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx
This is not something I have done before, I am bit daft when it comes to this.
Imagine this scenario, am I correct in saying that I backup my whole drive, live an image, then when the crash comes I get a new drive I run some sort of boot disk and it co[pies it all across or does it require win7 to be re installed?
Quote from: Drastic on June 04, 2013, 12:32:34 PM
I used to use Acronis, but Macrium Reflect has a free version and it's even better.
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx
Same here. I have owned both Ghost and Acronis, and find Macrium free better than both.
Here's what I do now.
1. Before a major event, I run Reflect and take a snapshot of the drive. I have had two drive failures before I gave up on HP laptops and I did restore from Reflect and it went well. So right now I'm traveling. As part of my pre-travel ritual, I took an image of my HD.
2. Then I also have Altaro Oops backup. This is awesome. You plug a HD into your router and Oops not only backs up on a set schedule (I have it back up hourly), but it uses a reverse delta. So in other words, the most recent backup is a full version of the file (whereas with an incremental delta like in Acronis, to get your most recent file you have to reconstruct the chain from the last full one). You can tell it how many versions to keep. I can't tell you how many times I have deleted a file or saved a file with some unintended change and used Oops to get it back.
I actually accidentally overwrote hundreds of key files for a website - the server had failed and I lost the live copy. Then in the perfect storm, I accidentally unzipped a tar archive to the wrong location and overwrote the older, stable version. Raw panic ensued for about two minutes until I realized that Oops was quietly running in the background and had copies that were 40 mins old, 1:40 old, 2:40 old and so on. Since it's only recording the deltas and since there hadn't been many file changes over the past week and since it only stores a new version of a file if it changes, that meant that for a few MB of diskspace, I had 30 versions (you can set this to what you want) going back 10 days and got everything back within a few minutes.
http://www.altaro.com/home-pc-backup/
Quote from: ukgimp on June 04, 2013, 01:09:18 PM
This is not something I have done before, I am bit daft when it comes to this.
Imagine this scenario, am I correct in saying that I backup my whole drive, live an image, then when the crash comes I get a new drive I run some sort of boot disk and it co[pies it all across or does it require win7 to be re installed?
You create a boot disk and completely re-image a new/different drive.
You can also mount the image as a browse-able drive. Handy if you just delete something and only need a file or two. Or if you need to get at something quickly before you have time for a full image.
I have it set to run on a schedule and backs up to a network drive.
I use Acronis on all my office workstations and Windows server machines. You do a bare metal installation of a drive image onto new, dissimilar hardware. That is the most flexible option I know of today. Other drive imaging software in the past required you to put the image back on the same or identical hardware.
Technically you could put a drive image onto new hardware if you're running Windows. Windows should detect the hardware change and offer to install new drivers, but it rarely works that smoothly in practice.
I use Macrium Reflect on my home machines as a secondary measure, but lately I've been relying on Windows 8 backup tools for almost everything. In Windows 8 you can turn on File History, and the OS will backup your data files to a remote drive automatically. The great thing with this is that you get multiple versions of your files. In addition to that you can optionally turn on the old Windows 7 System Image Backup, which will make an image file of your drive(s) on a schedule as well.