XP Backup does it all?

[Atlas]

Backing up with XP's backup an entire hard disk, including system state,
means everything is saved (registry and usually-unaccessible files?).
If so how to restore from a disaster?
Say you have the backup of the entire disk, say your hard disk crashes and
you want to restore the contents, WITHOUT reinstalling XP; does the recovery
boot from CD allow this?
Or any utility? (Excluding Ghost, Acronis and so on)
A simple utility that allows to boot quickly from CD and restore ......

 

[Willit]

What I have and do is I have a switch that swaps the
drives from master to slave. One goes down flip the switch
back in business.

http://www.cyberguys.com Part # 132 0210 $16.49

use this for backup 5 Gb in 7 min.

http://www.fssdev.com/products/ make the clone and then
un-plug the power to the drive if you want.

Want to test drive a Demo for 30 days. It has some
features disabled.

http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/3000-2248-10161152.html?
tag=lst-1-8

 

[BobDelaney]

It depends on what you are backing up to. If this is of vital importance
to you, get a tape drive, and do your backups to tape. This will, if your
computer is destroyed, stolen or if the hard disk fries, allow you to get a
new hard disk, install Windows and your backup software, and restore your
files as of the date of the last backup, hence regular backup habits are
important.
If you are backing up to a partition on your hard disk, as some people
do, then your safety net only extends to the computer or the hard disk.
Off-site storage of backup files is always best.

 

[Alex Nichol]

It depends on what you are backing up to. If this is of vital importance
to you, get a tape drive, and do your backups to tape.

Or these days to DVD. I keep a fairly tight system partition, and the
whole thing fits easily on a single DVD-R, which is only about $1 in 50s
now. With the sort of compression that is typically obtained, one disk
would handle a bit over 7GB actual data on say a 10GB partition
(eliminating things like old restore points in doing a disk cleanup
before backing up)