Backup Options

[David E. Ross]

My new PC (with WinXP) has two physical hard drives. I have all my
software on C and all my data on D. This is equivalent to the
configuration of my old PC (with Win98SE).

I backup weekly in a 3-week cycle:

Week #1: Backup the entire D-drive (normal mode for Windows'
ntbackup.exe). Do a delta backup (incremental mode) for my C-drive
excluding Windows. Do a delta backup for just Windows on my C-drive.

Week #2: Backup the entire C-drive (normal mode) excluding Windows. Do
a delta backup for just Windows on my C-drive. Do a delta backup for my
entire D-drive.

Week #3: Backup the entire Windows (normal mode). Do a delta backup
(incremental mode) for my C-drive excluding Windows. Do a delta backup
for my entire D-drive.

For each backup, I save the two latest cycles (a normal, two
incrementals, the next normal, and two more incrementals). Each week, I
also do an entire (normal mode) backup of my System State, saving the
three latest.

On my old PC, I did a similar backup process, backing up my registry and
rbnnn.cab files under Win98SE instead of my System State under WinXP.

I see a major difference between Msbackup.exe on Win98SE and
ntbackup.exe on WinXP. For each backup job, the former on Win98SE would
remember not only the folders and files to backup but also the options
for the job (which might be different for each backup job). The options
included whether the backup would be verified (which I did only for
Windows and the registry), where the backup files would be written, the
name of the last backup file, and what type of backup was last performed
for this job (equivalents of normal or incremental). The latter on
WinXP remembers only the folders and files for each backup job.
ntbackup.exe does remember its last set of options, file locations, and
files; but the default is to apply these even if they were for an
unrelated backup job.

Is there some way to make ntbackup.exe remember its options in a
job-specific manner? Or is there an alternate backup application that
will?

--

David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>

Concerned about someone (e.g., Pres. Bush) snooping
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See my <http://www.rossde.com/PGP/>

 

[Rock]

My new PC (with WinXP) has two physical hard drives. I have all my
software on C and all my data on D.

Is there some way to make ntbackup.exe remember its options in a
job-specific manner? Or is there an alternate backup application that
will?

I use a drive imaging program to create a compressed image of the partitions
and and store that image on an external USB drive. I also occasionally burn
a copy to DVD for redundancy and off site storage.

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

There are other more traditional backup solutions offered by several
companies that have greater capabilities than ntbackup but are similar in
their concept such as Stompsoft's PC BackUP, Sonic's Backup MyPC or
SecondCopy from www.centered.com.