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| System Backup 101 |
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Page 3 of 4 Now what if Windows isn't on it's own partition? Well technically you can still put Windows on it's own partition by simply creating a partition, installing Windows to that partition, then copying the old Windows to the new partition. That should work 9 times out of 10, although you may still need to reinstall some of your programs. If you're running XP (or 2000 or NT), you'll also need to copy over your user settings. All of this is tricky and time consuming but like we said it's best to put Windows on a partition when you first install it. It's highly recommended that Windows be put on it's own partition for the best possible backup solution. Now that we have Windows on it's own partition (maybe) and we have a second hard drive (or more) to backup onto let's start preparing the backup drive and discussing the actual backing up precedure. If you do have Windows on it's own partition, create a partition on the backup drive that's the same size, then create a partition utilizing the rest of the backup drive. If Windows isn't on it's own partition, then just leave the entire drive available. For the Windows partition we recommend a good hard drive cloning/mirroring program that can be scheduled to run at certain times and preferably runs within the OS so you don't have to restart to run. This is easier said then done with 2000 and XP though, since neither of those operating systems like to surrender their files to be copied while they are in use. One program we've found that works well is Casper XP. The interface is easy to use and easy to setup scheduling. It works within XP/2000, makes a perfect clone, and is incredibly fast. When backing up to a older 20gig drive Casper XP sustained 10+ mByte/sec transfer speeds. That's almost a gig every minute and a half, and no doubt that would increase greatly with a faster, larger, more modern hard drive. For those of you familiar with hard drive cloning I'm sure you said "What, no Ghost?" Norton Ghost is a fine cloning program, actually it's what we used before we found Casper XP, but we've made the switch for several reasons. One being that as of this writing Norton still couldn't clone XP within XP, it had to shutdown and restart the PC. For some people this is fine, but we didn't like this fact. Often times we'd leave the computer running downloading files overnight, and we didn't like the idea of the PC shutting down mid-way through a download. Another reason is price, ease of use, and easy scheduling. However if you're comfortable with Ghost than by all means use it, but we've used it, and felt other programs did a better job. |
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