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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (835)	5/25/1998 6:08:00 PM
From: Dave Hanson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Backup Solutions: Drive Image, partitions, and reply to Zespaul "If my harddrive has one partition ie C drive, is there also a separate boot partition? Is this a separate backup procedure?" No, so no. Sorry, should have clarified. I deliberately use seperate partitions for (1) applications and the OS, and (2) my key data. Sometimes (1) is further subdivided. There are several reasons for this. There are two main ones. First. with large hard drives, single FAT partitions start to waste lots of space due to large cluster sizes (has this been discussed here yet?) and can only be 2 GB each (unless it's an NT FAT partition, which can be 4 GB, but with even greater waste.) Second, seperate partitions makes backup and data transfer considerably easier. "Looking at the logistics of a complete restoration." Actually, you can restore any partition in one step. So, you can start with either the "quick restore" CD, or a clean install of your OS of choice (NT/95 dual boot, in my case, with the vast bulk of my work in NT.) I have a quick restore CD also, but prefer the clean install, since it lets me leave off all the extra space-hogging stuff I don't need, and since it lets me control exactly what's in my registry and other key files. Once you have done this, then you can use Drive Image save a image of this boot partition to either another partition on that or another hard drive (D:, E:, etc.) or another backup media (CDR, Jaz, Zip, etc.) The HDD option is faster and easier, the latter allows for easier removability and may be necessary if your boot partition takes the bulk of your hard drive. (I should add that Drive Image's files are a fraction not of the whole partition, but of the data residing on that partition. Hence a 2 GB boot partition with 300 megs of data would compress to 200 megs or less, rather than > 1 gig.) Having done that, you can then monkey with the clean boot configuration to your heart's content, knowing that it is a painless and quick restore away. Right now, I have several drive image files for my boot partition, but only one for my main data partition (which gets copied back and forth from notebook to desktop, depending on which has the most current files, i.e. which one I was working on last.) One DI file has a clean NT/95 C: partition with all necessary drivers working, but nothing else. Another has this and adds IE4 with the new desktop update. Another also adds the applications I use on C:. The only limit on the number of partitions I can keep stored on hard drive is: average space of the compressed drive image files/ available free space on the drives. This way, if I encounter a problem later, I can retreat only as far back as needed to solve the problem. Perhaps my "clean" drivers/IE 4/apps partition will work, in which case I'll save myself a lot of work and tweaking over having to begin with a fresh OS (or "restore CD" install.) Thus the steps are, 1. get a partition set up the way I like it, 2. make a drive image file and store it wherever I want to (usually another hard drive, sometimes a removable drive), then, in one integrated step, 3. simply restore the drive image file of choice over the (then current) C: partition that has been causing me problems, or that I want to change for some other reason. Hope this clarifies things a bit. If partitioning hasn't been discussed at all on this thread, that'd probably be a topic worth taking up. Either way, please feel free to follow up.