Backing up - no diskette drive

[Guest]

I am trying to backup the contents of my hardrive to a partition on the same
hardrive. I installed ntbackup and everything was going OK following the
wizard but then it said that I would need a diskette to store bootable info.
I don't have a diskette drive but I do have CD/DVD rw drive. How do I get it
to store the bootup info on a CD.

Also, I only have about 5GBs of info on my 250GB drive could I back up to
DVD (s) and if so how. How much info does a DVD hold. If I require 2 or three
DVD's do I need to use some utility that would allow me to restore all my
info to a reformatted HD.

thanks

 

[Guest]

To answer one of your questions DVD media can hold up to 4.7GB of memory.

 

[Rock]

I am trying to backup the contents of my hardrive to a partition on the same
hardrive. I installed ntbackup and everything was going OK following the
wizard but then it said that I would need a diskette to store bootable info.
I don't have a diskette drive but I do have CD/DVD rw drive. How do I get it
to store the bootup info on a CD.

Also, I only have about 5GBs of info on my 250GB drive could I back up to
DVD (s) and if so how. How much info does a DVD hold. If I require 2 or three
DVD's do I need to use some utility that would allow me to restore all my
info to a reformatted HD.

thanks

You must be trying to run the ASR wizard. That's what asks for a floppy
disc. Unfortunately there is no way to make it look to a CD. It must
look to the floppy. Keeping backup data on a different partition of the
same drive isn't very safe. Something damages the drive and no backup.

Ntbackup cannot backup to DVD. You can create the backup on an internal
drive then burn that backup file to DVD. If you go this route make sure
you test it to see if/how it works for recovery.

There are other backup solutions to consider. One is to use a drive
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 My PC. There are other good backup programs
out there as well. This can do a complete backup or backup individual
files and folders to CD/DVD and other drives.

 

[Guest]

I purchased an external hard drive today and will back up to it using one of
the programs you mentioned. I purchased a Maxtor one touch ll last week but
the backup software wouldn't work on my computer despite a week of trying
different things that Maxtor suggested. I finally got frustrated enough and
took the Maxtor back and purchased a no-name external hard drive. It doesn't
have backup software with it so I will get one of the second party selections
you suggested.

Thanks very much for your help.

 

[Plato]

I purchased an external hard drive today and will back up to it using one of
the programs you mentioned. I purchased a Maxtor one touch ll last week but
the backup software wouldn't work on my computer despite a week of trying
different things that Maxtor suggested. I finally got frustrated enough and

Next time close all your background apps and it would work.

 

[Rock]

I purchased an external hard drive today and will back up to it using one of
the programs you mentioned. I purchased a Maxtor one touch ll last week but
the backup software wouldn't work on my computer despite a week of trying
different things that Maxtor suggested. I finally got frustrated enough and
took the Maxtor back and purchased a no-name external hard drive. It doesn't
have backup software with it so I will get one of the second party selections
you suggested.

Thanks very much for your help.

:

You're welcome and good luck.

 

[Guest]

I am now using a trial version(fully enabled) of Acronis true image and the
backup went fine. The problem came when I went to make a bootable CD, I got
an error message saying "unable to write to CD". I tried writing to it using
Sonic record now and it worked fine so why not with the Acronis program.
The other question I have is - it says I can create a bootable file on an
external hdd however my external hdd does not show up in the list of
removable devices. I checked the properties of the drive and it said it was a
"local drive". How do I get it to show up as a removable drive?