backing up to fully bootable state

kronas

i have a 250GB hard drive which is set and tweaked for optimum preformance, files, etc are all important, what is the best way of backing up using USB ? so if there is a hard drive faliure i can boot a backup with everything on ?

im running windows xp pro

TNG

I would (and have) personally invest 18-odd quid in Acronis TrueImage

Fantastic....

BillScarab

I'm not sure I understand the question but you could get an external hard drive and use something like Acronis to take an image of your PC. If you have a Seagate or Maxtor drive you can download a free copy of Acronis.

bookduck

I've never recently used Acronis TrueImage, but recommend Symatec Ghost v12 - think they are very similar products. Probably symatec charge £18 just for the sticky label on the box though.

However if your not worried about integrity of the data, and just wanting to get back to a workable PC without loosing your Original settings (updates will be lost, ans so will that 30 day trial ware license) then http://www.rollbacksoftware.com/ might be another solution.

If your worried about h/w failure and running xp pro or server, then disk mirroring might be easier especially with availability of cheap disks http://www.petri.co.il/software_mirror_in_windows_xp.htm. Obviously this method will not help against deletions or virus removal.

kronas

BillScarab wrote: »

I'm not sure I understand the question but you could get an external hard drive and use something like Acronis to take an image of your PC. If you have a Seagate or Maxtor drive you can download a free copy of Acronis.

basically i want to back up everything i have now (os, files, etc) so if i have a failure i can just get the hard drive out of the case and slip the backup in there and away i go again, but i cant connect another hard drive inside the case to image it, so i was wondering if i can do the imaging via usb!

BillScarab

What you are talking about is mirroring. An image is a point in time snapshot of your entire system, to recover from it you need tor eplace the failed disc and then restore the image. You can do this to an exteranl hard drive via USB.

To set up mirroring you need a motherboard that supprots it (or and add on card) and then two or more identical hard disks in your machine. Then when you've set it up every time something chamges on your disc it is copied to the mirror. If one fails you still have another working disc you can boot from. You then replace the failed disc and rebuild the mirror.

bookduck

HP ProLiant DL380 support raid5, so any one of the drives can go faulty and it still works. Probably on your existing system, you can't. You have to have the right version of windows to do raid/dynamic disks.

With Ghost, you can install your new empty hdd and boot up from the Ghost CD, then re-image the new hdd from the dvd or usb disk. I'm not sure about Acronis TrueImage, but most others you have to Install the new disk, then install the OS, then install the backup program, and only after this is done can you restore your software.

BillScarab

Acronis works in the same way as Ghost, they're do the same job.

Not sure of the relevance of Proliant DL380's, he's not likely to be running an enterprise class server. Lots of Motherboards in home PC's support RAID 0 and RAID 1, it started becomign more common with the introduction SATA drives. I've just got rid of an old PC that I used RAID 1 on.

Kronas do you know what brand of Hard Drive is in your PC?