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Backing up to protect against operating system or hard drive failure

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JeffK:
I want to access the thinking of all you gurus here regarding this subject which is somewhat perplexing me.

I have had my current computer for I suppose five years.  I have had Windows XP on it for about a year after it was released so my original disks predate Service Pack 1.

In that time I have had computer problems which required me to reinstall XP about 8 times.  On four of those occasions I have done a "repair" reinstall which has left my registry settings and documents intact.  But on the other occasions the problem have been so severe I have had to do a complete reinstall thus losing access to both documents and installed applications because registry settings are overwritten.

This is becoming more and more problematic as Windows XP needs to be updated with the service packs as well.

I have a backup regime sorted out.  I use Paragon Drive Backup to take images of each of my partitions and Genie Backup Pro to take file backups.  The images are on a second internal hard drive, and the file backups are on external USB drives

However what will happen if my OS or the hard disk fails again.  How will I use these backups to restore the OS as it was with my settings intact.  Or in other words what backup should I make of the system partition, so that if the OS fails and I cannot boot I can restore that partition as it was with as little fuss as possible?

Any comments and advice would be appreciated.

Best wishes (and by the way Happy Easter to Donation Coders),

Jeff

mouser:
I have a backup regime sorted out.  I use Paragon Drive Backup to take images of each of my partitions and Genie Backup Pro to take file backups.  The images are on a second internal hard drive, and the file backups are on external USB drives
--- End quote ---

Well it sounds like you are doing exactly the right thing.
As i understand it you are making images of your operating system partitions, and storing them on an independent hard drive.

so if your main hard drive completely dies, your recovery procedure would look like this:
1) buy a new hard drive of equal or larger size.
2) replace the dead main hard drive with new one.
3) boot up with PARAGON rescue cd (i assume there is such a thing or something related)
4) use that rescue cd or floppy to RESTORE from a partition image to the new hard drive.
5) reboot and you should be back to the last saved image.

(note you could test this out by buying a new hard drive and pretending your main one has died and replace it - it's always useful to do a test run to see if their are any unexpected snags).

f0dder:
A thing to remember: keep OS + programs on one partition, and ALL data files (source code, "My Documents", etc. yadda yadda) on another. That way you'll "only" lose program settings when you revert to a drive image.

JeffK:
Actually I've probably gone a bit overboard in that respect.  My setup is

Drive C: OS and things such as the startmenu files
D: Applications related to the management of the computer itself eg my backup software
E: regular applications eg MS Office
F: data, My  Documents etc
G: downloaded software
H: essential downloads (stuff I've purchased and backup more carefully)

And that's just disk 1.

Jeff

f0dder:
Hehe, does sound a bit overkill to me. for my mirrored 160gb, I have windows+apps on C, source+docs+data on D, downloads+games on E, and other stuff on F... I'm probably going to merge E and F since that split doesn't make sense. Got a separate 80gig Q partition, which I use as a "scratchpad" - it's nice having a separate *drive* when you do disk-intensive stuff, even if you main drive(s) supports NCQ. And I do a lot of messing around with creating unattended windows setups with nLite, which involves a *lot* of shuffling around.

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