Total Back Up Of Computer

I use Acronis True Image Home edition and a Maxtor external USB drive, but I'm sure there are lots of other ghosting software out there. Acronis lets you make either incremental backups or an image of the entire C: drive, as well as any other drives you may have partions set up for. If my hard drive crashes, it's a relatively simple matter to install a new drive, then run the bootable Acronis disk and restore the saved image from my external USB drive over to the new drive. I think the only caveat is that the new drive must have free space greater than the amount of material being copied over to it. I've got C: partitioned at 40G and it takes about 20 minutes to make the ghost image. Oh, one other gotcha, the Acronis software installs with a password. DO NOT lose this password!

With the price of hard drives so low these days, I'd say get a new drive (same size or bigger than your existing drive) and clone your current drive onto the new one. If your current drive crashes, just replace it with the backup one and you'll be exactly where you were when you made the clone.

Obviously need to back up new data etc. as you go along, and maybe make a new clone after installing new software. If you got a couple of new drives you could alternate them.

Gets more complicated if you're already using one than one drive...

BTW - I'm currently formatting a new drive I got this morning (on my desktop machine). The old HDD is only 80GB, so I was looking at 160GB as an upgrade. Went to Maplins to get one, and found they had an 800GB for the same price. When I got it out of the box, a note inside said they'd run out of 800's so I had a free upgrade to 1TB . Drawback is that it's now been formatting for 2½ hours, and has nearly ½hr to run .

Will it also backup the programs?

Yes! It does the whole thing - the cloning operation makes an exact copy of everything on the disk. Make the clone, swap the drives - and you wouldn't know that it had ever happened (except that if the new drive was bigger, you'd suddenly have lots of extra free disk space). This includes stuff that I've brought forward from years ago, that only runs in a DOS window.

Aside - my new 1TB drive is now formatted, and appears in Windows Explorer. (That took 3½ hours). Next step is to download and run some cloning software. I've done it before, but only using "one-try-only" trial versions. I'll keep y'all posted.

All done.

I used EaseUS to do the cloning. The PC re-starts, running Linux, to do the actual clone operation. Don't know how long it took - I left it running with the "shut down PC when operation complete" option checked. About 2 hours, I think.

Had to do a couple of re-starts after the cloning, the last one after removing the old HDD. Properties of the new system drive:

Why Not parallelly copy in the Hard disc. connected in parallel, (just like a carbon copy) with some protections to the 2nd hard disc.

Rajeswari

Great for data as used in RAID style systems but may not work for the OS.

I signed up with these guys. Haven't needed them yet, but I lost stuff on my last meltdown. It sucks. I signed up for 3 years............it's a little cheaper.

http://www.carbonite.com/en/

Apricorn was recommended to me in the past. I haven't tried them but they might be worth a little research time.

http://www.apricorn.com/products/notebook-hard-drive-upgrade-kits/ez-upgrade-universal-hard-drive-upgrade-kit.html?type=reg&id=1023.

For my desk top I use a Seagate 2TB external drive and the Memeo software that was included with it. I back-up a 200GB internal, a 1TB internal and a 300GB external with it. Plenty of room for everything on it and even then some for misc archives.

One important thing I learned after setting it up as USB 2.0 was to use its USB 3 connection and not the USB 2. With USB 2 it took over 2 days to do the initial complete back up. After USB 3 was connected it was down to less than 6 hrs. I did an initial complete and supplement it with incrementals that are done in the background. I have used it to restore files that got messed up without any problems, very simple to do once I had confidence in it. I have used it for over 6 months and am very satisfied with the system.

I thought of adding a large internal drive instead but the external allows me to easily disconnect the drive and restore the whole system, or part of it, to another computer.

Costs were about $120 (now down to less than $100, and 3TB are now available) for the 2TB ext. drive, $30 for a internal USB card with 2 connections, and $10 for a USB 3 cable.

Again, only run it with USB 3 since 2.0 takes about 6 times longer!

Good Luck, Old Salt

I tried cloning my older drive onto newer drive. XP would NOT play. Reported a hardware error which I eventually determined was created because XP with SP 3 detected the different drive so it looked like I was attempting a second install.

This was confirmed by my computer reepair guy. H hss to get a special password if doing computer repair involving crashed hard drive. Unles you know somebody this usually means paying for a 'repair' or a replacement softwre OS install.

Ge what a coincidence the cost is the same for either.

When I complained to Microsoft they sid I wsa either running a stolen comput4eror I had moved from wher In had registered the computer originally. Tlk about big Brother!

You can get the "special password" from MS by calling the XP line...only until 2013 though (when XP support officially ends).

who is in place to offer aftermarket support for xp after 2013?

the market is huge, not everyone will want to upgrade or run out & buy a new pc

I'm on various flavors of linux, others will, just use mobile devices, a more than a few to the chrome OS

that leaves millions who would pay a few bucks for patches

Nobody will offer support any more than there was aftermarket support for Windows 95 or DOS.

Since the latest iteration of IE (9) does not support XP people will simply have to shift to the right. You don't necessarily have to buy a new PC, just get a new OS if you want continued support. A huge chunk of the market still doesn't use patches and updates so they will be as affected as they are now...not at all...until the internet just stops working for them.

If you use the computer just as it is and don't need worldly connection it will work fine, just like your '84 LeBaron Convertible.

Remember leaded gas?

XP isn't DOS or 98

there are far more potential business customers

IE9 is a non issue, just like 7 made for the latest & greatest hardware

there's plenty of 2ghz 1gb ram pentium machines which will only barely run 7 resource hog that it is

Seems to me this begs the question of 'do we really need all these constant upgrades?" Maybe the nerdies who can afford it delight in all these new and improved versions but for the rest of the world if it works it in't broken so why mess with it?

I don't go out and buy a new stove or toaster every year. I only buy something new whenr the old stops working nd can't be fixed. For the average person, the basic functions such as word processing spread sheet email etc is fine. Yet every time microsoft comes out with a new and improved OS it seems our old stuff no longer works properly and is deemed incompatible.

actually there are people doing patches for 98, the occasional driver...

the only thing that's critical are the security patches

wouldn't be surprising the security providers macafee, norton, avg & the like will do some level of this stuff, low hanging fruit

all the pc shops are drooling, trying to whip everyone into a y2k like frenzy, same forecasts of doom & gloom

I was speaking of actual Microsoft support for the operating system. MS ended support for 98 on July 11, 2006.

"actual Microsoft support"

Somewhat of a contradiction in terms - they probably benefit more from their customer base and if they got it right the first time it would be a whole lot better.

The world is a dynamic place. From the time of production when a product goes out the door it already needs support in the form of updates to the software.

The same goes for all other OS' in existence, not just MS.

I remember when LINUX was truly "open architecure". Now there are so many variants out there with very little corporate support, save for your own staff of engineers and programmers, it makes it difficult to get things done for the small business owner who wants tweaks to the software with the same hardware base. That, in large part, is why the majority of small to medium businesses (and a dose of large) still use MS with its existant support architecture.

Typical life-cycle for (US) government hardware is 3-5 years. Typical life-cycle for government software (apps) is quarterly. The gov't depends heavily on that stable OS with outside support to maintain its systems without having to worry about matching app and OS lifecycle changes at the exponential rate.

I was in a state office the other day

the GUI looked for all the world like 98

some doctors offices have black & green screens for their billing system [eds clone]

there's certainly people doing support for legacy stuff

in terms of number of potential customers

XP could easily prove to be the mother of all legacy OS's, for many years to come

Some specialty third party sofetware may also have been based on an older OS. Examples are cash registers, restaurant food order terms and what have you.

Anybody know wht CPU system and OS the original space shuttle used? I think they wrote specific software and didn't mess with it just because a newer version as available.

Houston we have a problem call microsoft tech support"

I have heard a hardened version of the Commodore 64.

The Apollo missions used a variant of the AN/UYK-20(V). 64k of memory with a 4k micromemory (bootstrap memory).

Tactical Government systems rarely (if ever) used COTS software in those days.

I don't recall having to take the car down to have its brain updated.

We run a SCADA software application which runs a number of industrial processes. In original form it ran on Windows 3.1. The current version had its roots in W95, runs successfully on W98, W2000ME and WXP (with the usual occasional RS232/USB issues) and has never required an upgrade, fix or fiddle. The only reason for changing over time has been the owners' IT requirement to have the latest OS common across the sites. Because they want to keep it current, common to all the machines, it too has to have an "unnecessary" (unnecessary for its task) update.

If Windows was free I could understand the developers wanting to fiddle with improvements, causing some user inconvenience, but when it has a cost ........................

I'm still getting requests to tender with XP specified as the OS - the customers are specifying 25 years for the life of the systems.

I agree that XP is going to have to be supported (by someone) for quite some time, just as the life of VB (Visual Basic) has been stre_____________tched.

That said, the systems I'm talking about are stand-alone (i.e. not connected to or reliant on the internet), so as long as there's some hardware that'll run them, there's no problem.

I still support systems I designed running on DOS, on 80286's.

A bit of an OT aside - how long is RS232 going to exist^[1]? Lots of new stuff still gets made with RS232 interfaces, but very few computers do.

[1] forever, obviously - but you know what I mean.

If you want to maintain an ongoing backup, Acronis is a good choice. With real backup software, the first backup takes a very long time, but subsequent backups only update the image to reflect changes to your HD.

If you want to clone your drive just once, you can do that for free using DD (originally a Unix app), which comes on the Ubuntu Live CD.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/19141/clone-a-hard-drive-using-an-ubuntu-live-cd/

Subsequent clones will take even longer than the first one, however.

When considering backing up your computer data, one should always consider the fact that just your computer alone may not be melting down, but the room it is in, or the house/office, etc. Therefore, one would be wise to use an offsite backup company such as Carbonite,

I have to agree with Spooklight as I have the very same software setup. I use an external 1 TB backup drive fed by an USB port. Very happy with the way it performs, which has been flawless!

It backs up everything on a daily basis, including AUTOCAD drawings!

I am running SATA Seagate hard drives under windows XP. I use the Seagate software to clone the master disk to the new disk. This has worked very well. Do the copy, unplug the master disk & plug the old master disks SATA cable into the new copy & reboot. Everything is there all of the programs, all of the data & all of the drivers. After confirming proper operation store the old master in a safe place.

I do not know anything about doing a clone to a USB drive but your computer must be new enough to boot from a USB port.

I used to do the same thing with Maxtor drives.

Good luck

Carbonite............. 3 Questions:

1. How does the back up work? Does it copy everything....verbatem???

jpegs, tiff, dwg, gif, video,WORD, Outlook email address book, etc..........

2. So, I get a hit by lightning ( like has happened twice in 5 years).

I go to the computer store ( not Best Buy, but a smaller shop ) and buy a "new" computer. What now? How do the guys at my store, deal with all of my stuff stashed away at the Carbonite locale?

3. If the same HACKERS , that can crack into governement and military sites , know that CArbonite is holding everybody's private details, what keeps Carbonite from just having a big Bulls Eye painted on their store front?

I've been using Carbonite for years with no problems at all. My attorney, who is also a geek, got me started on it after my hard drive failed and he spent two days recovering data.

Carbonite, or others, automatically backup your hard drive daily, or more often if you set it for that. The first backup takes a spell, then the next ones go quickly as only new info is added. The backup is just like clicking on "My computer" and you will see everything that is on your C/D drives, and other memory storage devices within your computer. You can download the whole drive to any computer, anywhere with a website connection, or just say, "My Documents" if you only use a portion of a drive or a file becomes corrupted. If you have some serious crap on your computer that you absolutely cannot replace, then an offsite storage is the only way to go, unless you are doing daily backups to an external hard drive and then moving that external hard drive to a bomb shelter.

Carbonite, and others, use military grade encryption that is damn near impenetrable.

Just ghost the drive.

Netmaker,

I followed Andy Germany's suggestion in this thread http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/69127/How-Do-I-Ghost-a-Hard-Drive and used

http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/free-backup-software.htm

One of those rare PC exercises I had 100% success in replicating a hard drive to be plug n play as a direct swap. I was looking to make a direct plugable replacement for an 80Gb laptop. Bought an 80Gb hard drive, ran the application which took 4 hours to replicate and it worked exactly as the old one when it was inserted and booted. Emails, software applications, registrations, passwords, remote customer connections, the lot. I only had to do 2 things to complete - re-validate the XP version and MS Office to MS, about 30 seconds. It saved a heck of a lot of time of formatting, installing O/S, software and email transfers you go through in a recovery process.

The target drive has to equal or exceed the one you are looking to clone and some have apparently had it work on a different configuration target PC but I haven't tried that.

As I say, one of those rare moments and it would be worth trying. Good luck.

Norton Ghost.

Regarding issues of older hardware and long-term support, the Linux OS called Wary Puppy is designed to address both these issues.

http://bkhome.org/wary/

Of course the backup program DD is available as in other Linux versions but only via command line, no GUI.

I just bought this one from QVC. It's 500GB, details on the link.

I checked around the web a little, but didn't find a better deal.