Automated System Recovery Backs Up Entire Computer

[Guest]

I have three hard drives with 186 Gb of data on them. I want to make an
Automated System Recovery backup. But when I use the ASR wizard, it attempts
to backup the entire 186 Gb on the third disk. I then get an error message
that the ASR backup file is too large. Is there a way to get ASR to back up
only the crucial system data on my c:\ drive?

Also, the one time my computer crashed and I used ASR, it formatted my c:\
drive and I lost important data. Is that the way it is supposed to work?

 

[Rock]

I have three hard drives with 186 Gb of data on them. I want to make an
Automated System Recovery backup. But when I use the ASR wizard, it attempts
to backup the entire 186 Gb on the third disk. I then get an error message
that the ASR backup file is too large. Is there a way to get ASR to back up
only the crucial system data on my c:\ drive?

Also, the one time my computer crashed and I used ASR, it formatted my c:\
drive and I lost important data. Is that the way it is supposed to work?

I don't believe you custom tune ASR. And IMO it doesn't work very well
anyway. There are better backup solutions.

One is to use an imaging program. This makes an exact image of the
partition which can be saved on CD/DVD or to another drive - internal or
external. Imaging to an external USB 2.0 / Firewire drive works well.
Then occasionally burning an image to DVD gives you redundancy.
Restores can be done of the entire partition or individual files /
folders. These work well and make it easy to recover from a drive crash.
Examples of this are:

Norton Ghost 10
Acronis True Image
Terabyte Unlimited's Image for Windows
CasperXP

The second option is a traditional backup program such as Stompsoft's PC
BackUP or Sonic’s Backup MyPC. They are good tools. - and the evolution
of ntbackup. There are other good backup programs out there as well.
This can do a complete backup or backup individual files and folders to
DVD/CD and other drives.

 

[Steve]

When you select "Backup everything on this computer", NTBackup creates
an ASR backup set that contains data from all drives. When you open
NTBackup in Advanced mode and select ASR Wizard, it usually backs up
the whole system partition (C:\), but not the other drives. Some people
prefer to have a smaller system partition to reduce the size of ASR
backups, and keep user data on separate partitions.

You can also choose to save just "System State" (registry and system
files) but I don't think this will allow you to perform a bare metal
restore.

 

[coal_brona]

Hi,

If the drive is formatted you can still definately restore some data. I
suppose Active@ Undelte and Uneraser (for pure DOS) have the best
chances. These are mighty data recovery tools, that I've used before
and can say works simply great and never failed to restore, nor thay
corrupted recovered info. You should really give it a try.

http://www.active-undelete.com/

http://www.uneraser.com/

 

[Guest]

I ultimated solved the problem by disabling the second drive. With respect
to the third drive, which was designated to receive the backup file, ASR
didn't seem to be set up to copy that drive. Thus, I ended up being able to
limit the ASR backup to one of three drives.