The ultimate backup routine

Working without a backup of your Windows C drive is like trying to
compose a document without being able to save copies.

.... get yourself a small solid-state drive (SDD) and a big
conventional hard disk drive (HDD), use the SDD as primary and the
HDD as secondary

.... get yourself a free program called Macrium Reflect

.... install Windows, using Macrium Reflect to periodically make a
copy of your SDD to your HDD

.... whenever anything significant goes wrong that you don't want
to mess with, make a "delme" copy of your current installation,
backup any data that is not kept as an ordinary file on your
Windows drive C (for example, Firefox bookmarks)

.... make appropriate backup folders on your big HDD drive, I name
those folders chronologically and according to the current
interest here, like "6 Dragonfly, SupCom, b4 Hotspot"

.... drop your backup Macrium Reflect CD in your DVD drive,
restart, select the most recent known good copy of Windows drive
C, and restore it to your SDD

.... once you get back into your nice neat clean copy of Windows,
you can use Macrium Reflect to browse the delme copy of drive C
and retrieve any updated files you need

If you need encouragement, just hang around this group for a while
and listen to the occasional sad story about losing data from a
hard drive that was not backed up. The above method provides
solutions to much more than that, it's a whole new world of
computing.

On Oct 17, 6:48*pm, John Doe wrote:
Working without a backup of your Windows C drive is like trying to
compose a document without being able to save copies.

... get yourself a small solid-state drive (SDD) and a big
conventional hard disk drive (HDD), use the SDD as primary and the
HDD as secondary

... get yourself a free program called Macrium Reflect

... install Windows, using Macrium Reflect to periodically make a
copy of your SDD to your HDD


Do you have to copy the entire boot partition? What about using a
small boot partition on the big HD? I am not sure I've seen any
performance advantage to having my 36GB 10K as the boot drive. I have
not tried SSD's yet.

On Oct 17, 9:05 pm, Davej wrote:

Do you have to copy the entire boot partition? What about using a
small boot partition on the big HD? I am not sure I've seen any
performance advantage to having my 36GB 10K as the boot drive. I have
not tried SSD's yet.

Two hours setup on a dozen drives over two hard discs. Two open
cases, one behind and one in front. Three or four HDs, including USB
docks and an occasional USB stick. One physical drive to rebuild,
partition, format for appropriate sector sizes, and transfer a couple-
hundred gig data twice for downsizing two partitions into one.

The OS-s run permanently now 1 or 2 minutes transfer (copy or write),
and a linked, one-shot windows prg drive was pretty sweet, too, at 4
minutes for three times as big (tricky dicky programs like firewalls
that don't want to be copied other than going through the backdoor in
binary mode).

BIOS BOOT Drive c0 c1 X X-26th . . . X0, X0 is prg drive
c0-DOS boot shows c1
c1-windows boot does not show c0

next physical drive for binary backups
(some not all systems may get a performance boost across different
physical drives in dos binary transfers -
same then follows for X0 and a quicker boot when separating windows
installs from windows * can't have your cake and eat it under two
minutes any other way.)

ghosting in art school is done on c0 in DOS 98 or 6.2 with fat32
drives

Flasherly Flasherly live.com wrote:

Davej wrote:

Do you have to copy the entire boot partition? What about using
a small boot partition on the big HD? I am not sure I've seen
any performance advantage to having my 36GB 10K as the boot
drive. I have not tried SSD's yet.

Two hours setup on a dozen drives over two hard discs. Two open
cases, one behind and one in front.

That sounds like dialogue at the start of a detective movie.

Davej galt_57 hotmail.com wrote:

John Doe wrote:

Working without a backup of your Windows C drive is like trying
to compose a document without being able to save copies.

... get yourself a small solid-state drive (SDD) and a big
conventional hard disk drive (HDD), use the SDD as primary and
the HDD as secondary

... get yourself a free program called Macrium Reflect

... install Windows, using Macrium Reflect to periodically make
a copy of your SDD to your HDD

Do you have to copy the entire boot partition?

I don't think so. You can try.

What about using a small boot partition on the big HD?

If you have a big HDD, you can try.

I am not sure I've seen any performance advantage to having my
36GB 10K as the boot drive. I have not tried SSD's yet.

What works is what matters here. Using Macrium Reflect is just too
easy, and the benefit of keeping backup copies of your Windows
drive C is out of this world. Believe it or not. Like I said, hang
around the script long enough to hear all of the crying about
having lost data. And, again, having browsable(!) read-only backup
copies of drive C solves all of your problems.

the script

sorry... "this group"

On Oct 17, 11:14 pm, John Doe wrote:


That sounds like dialogue at the start of a detective movie.

May be. Takes awhile to get to know a new system.

On Oct 18, 3:25 pm, Bear Bottoms wrote:

read more »

Or don't read nothing more than the simple need *NOT* to be online.

Not a practical approach, but what's practically so demanding about a
casual homeuser's perusals.

- NEVER go online when building a reliable system, ie installing
software, prior to the backup.

- No matter how ****-poor your computer "hardening" efforts are, if
your backups are sufficient, you're effectively over the hump and well
on the way learning to customize a level of protection as you gain
experience, at what levels specifically will apply to your needs.

-Keep your installs insulated from prior backups. When there are
question, doubt or uncertainty, then give yourself adequate time to
gain trust for a program before shifting up the backups and
incorporating that program among the regular itinerary of standbys and
familiars.

I read, some say, that within 5 minutes of going online the average
computer user -will be- compromised variously by unauthorized incoming
connections.

Well, what's there left -- but rootkits and a BIOS attack for
motherboards with dual-bios chipped MBs, one that being pin-jumpered
for write protection -- which you'll probably never practically
encounter, either, if you just stay away from a likes of "one under
and one over sites." May your days be happily filled with two-handed
typing.

On Oct 17, 6:48*pm, John Doe wrote:
[...]
... get yourself a free program called Macrium Reflect


http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

Ok, but wouldn't this program be better if it ran under Linux? Maybe
there is a Linux equivalent? If it was Linux you could boot off of a
CD or a USB stick. Plus it could store the backups on a Linux
partition where no Windows program could touch them.

Davej galt_57 hotmail.com wrote:

John Doe wrote:

... get yourself a free program called Macrium Reflect


http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

Ok, but wouldn't this program be better if it ran under Linux?
Maybe there is a Linux equivalent? If it was Linux you could
boot off of a CD or a USB stick. Plus it could store the backups
on a Linux partition where no Windows program could touch them.

You need to stop making excuses and get it done.