"D. Best" <Exercise Your Body, Mind & Freedoms@Nam 69,70,71> wrote:
I am looking for some free backup software so that if necessary I can
restore my system in case of crash ... I would also like it to be able to
schedule daily backups ... any suggestions for some good software?
If I understand you correctly, you are looking for two different types
of backup here; system and data file.
It's best to backup the system after a clean install and after
installing all critical updates and the programs that you use. Set up
your email program, dialer, etc. (everything that needs to be setup)
Then create an image, or mirror your drive and you'll always have a
good base install to come back to!
Within a matter of minutes you can go from an infected system that
will not boot right back to the pristine image or mirrored drive.
If you're using Win9x or ME with the patch for real DOS this program
will mirror your boot drive to another partition:
http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy10.htm
You'll need an extra partition, or better, another drive to mirror to.
With this method you can also do your daily data file backups to the
same destination. No problem.
You'll probably want a boot manager too. This hides the mirrored drive
when you don't need it. I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure that this
will make the hidden partitions appear as non-MS partitions. That is,
no malwares written for Windows can harm your backup partition. That's
pretty slick.
When I ran 98SE I created 3 partitions. I did a clean install, got the
updates, installed and setup all the programs that I wanted and then
used XOSL to unhide another partition. Then I used xxcopy to clone,
hid that partition and unhid the other and cloned to it.
I labeled them Mine, Kids, and Backup. The kids chose their partition
to boot from and the others were hidden and safe. Whenever required I
could boot from one partition, format the bad one, and xxcopy the
backup clone partition to it in minutes. Presto! All drivers loaded,
all programs setup... I might have to grab a new critical update or
two and update the AV, but that sure beats reinstalling, downloading,
and setting everything back up again.
Boot Manager: XOSL
Partition Tool: Ranish (or use fdisk)
http://www.ranish.com/part/
If you're using XP or server 2003, the Ultimate Boot CD 4 Win is the
tool that you'll need. This is a great project that allows repair,
data recovery, cloning and imaging your boot partition. The deal is
that you cannot clone or image the boot drive with these OSs. You'll
use your MS install CD to create a bootable CD with all of the
freeware tools you could ever need to do pretty much anything you'll
need to do. Very impressive! (thanks james for mentioning it here)
http://www.ubcd4win.com/
Check the FAQ, become familiar with the instructions, check out the
_very_ helpful forum. It's a lot of information. I screwed up and made
a whole bunch of coasters before I got it right. I did make a more
straightforward guide to assist in creating the CD though:
http://www.woundedmoon.org/UBCD/UBCD.html
I still need to do better with the image sizes... you might download
one of the zip files to view offline if the images don't all load.
In this case, you can create another partition to hold the image
files. Using DrvImagerXP with compression you'll need a partition ~2\3
the size of your boot partition. Create one the same size and it can
hold the image files and your daily data file backups. Again, another
drive is best.
For daily data backups, try MOB:
http://www.woundedmoon.org/win32/mobv21.html
You can save to any drive you have, zip, floppy, CD-RW, or a hard
disk...
