Vista - For 2009, resolve to back up your computer files, and do it

With Vista, you need to reinstall Vista, reinstall the service packs, do a system state administrative restore, Restore your partitions and data.

And when Vista is OEM? Then what?

Both Acronis, as found in the FREE Seagate Disk Wizard or Maxtor's MaxBlast will back up Vista to another drive or partition, with NO problem.
Did I mention it's FREE?

Also, for the Ghost fanatics, you must be using Ghost 11.5 or greater, to back up Vista.

Don't waste your time, just backing up data files. That's pretty fruitless when your hard drive crashes. What about your OS and all those hundreds of settings you've worked so hard to get just right? And your email?

Just back up the whole C: drive (or partition) and don't worry about the details.
A second hard drive makes the best and fastest backup you can get.
An external USB drive works OK, but is much slower. A DVD backup is probably the safest, but also the slowest.
I've done them all, so I can speak from experience.

Backup! Backup! Backup!
The Shadow

Your data is more important than your OS or applications.

You can reinstall your OS and applications from the master DVDs. You can't restore your data from them.

What Master DVD's are you talking about, that don't have your data on them?

I've been setting up backup schemes for home and business for 28 years now.
I do my own Ghost backups at least once a week and sometimes as many as four or five times a week, depending on what I'm doing.

I started using Ghost in 1997, when it first came out, long before Symantec bought it. In all these years I've never lost the first thing due to a HD crash or some piece of crapola software messing up my HD.

With Ghost Explorer, I can go back into any old Ghost Backup Image and restore any file or folder I might desire.

Shadow

I have to agree with TheShadow. Lots of games and software now have activation/protection. Restoring an image backup to a new drive (in case of HD failure) makes more sense than ever. It would take days to re-install the OS, the apps and the games nowadays. Then you have to re-apply the patches and what not. With an image restore, it will take 1 to 2 hours at most and your PC is completely restored just the way it was on a new, faster, bigger, better hard drive... no need to reactivate the OS or any other software.

I have done this using Vista Ultimate Complete PC Backup... and yes you can restore to a bigger hard drive with different partition sizes no problems... just do your research. I just recently upgraded my slow/noisy Seagate 500 GB drive with C (OS/Apps) and D (Files) partitions (250 GB each) to a faster/quieter 640 GB WD Black partitioned into C (OS/Apps - 340 GB) and D (Files - 300 GB) with no problems.

Everything was restored the way it was, Applications, Bookmarks, emails (Thunderbird), etc. The new hard drive is faster/quieter than the old. With Terabyte drives getting cheaper nowadays, there is no reason not to use one instead of DVDs for creating image backups.

And to the poster who mentioned you will be restoring images that include malware, do your research. You can do incremental images everymonth and restore images from a chosen date... so long as your backup hard drive can accomodate these.

Moving respectfully along.......

Malware? Who has malware in this day and age of Malware enlightenment?
NOT ME!!!!
With the very best Anti-Malware software on the planet, 100% FREE, having any malware at all on ones computer is ridiculous at best.

It's been years, since I had any Virus, Trojan, etc. on my own PC.
And with a reasonable install of protection software, my hundreds of customers stay 100% free of malware too.

When it comes to Malware protection, I can go light or heavy, depending on ones internet habits.

This thread is all about backups, not malware so I won't go into the specific steps I take to stay 100% malware free. Maybe another time.

On doing backups, I would like to say that if one will do some serious HD maintenance before doing their backup, they can reduce the time and MB's that a backup takes.

Using Ghost 2003 to make a backup of my C: drive to my D: drive, for instance takes only about six minutes on my SATA2 HD.
I reduce the size of the files that I back up by almost 4 gigabytes by cleaning up all the junk on my HD, including the old restore points and Pagefile, before actually doing the backup. Just having the backup program on your HD adds files to the backup and is totally redundant.
Backups are better done from a boot disk, than from the hard drive.

I've been doing Ghost 2003 backups on my own system from a floppy disk, for years.
I keep my C: drive clean and in FAT-32 mode (Windows XP) and from my boot floppy, I run a sequence of batch files to remove all the junk files from C: before I do the backup. Finally, my clean backup takes only about six minutes and will even fit on a single DVD, Flash Drive or (of course) a second HD.

Vista requires at least Ghost 11.5, which won't fit on a floppy ,
so I run 11.5 from a bootable Flash Drive or CD. I have both.

If you Prefer Acronis True Image, over Ghost..... No problem!

Both Seagate's Disk Wizard and Maxtor's MaxBlast include the ability to make a backup CD, with Acronis True Image software on it. Both programs are FREE to download.
You just need either a Seagate or Maxtor hard drive somewhere in your system.

Once that CD is made, the parent program can be un-installed from the hard drive, thus decreasing your file load.
Keeping ones C: drive clean, lean and mean, doesn't happen by accident.
A person really has to work at it.

A little side effect of doing my weekly backup with Ghost, is that once the backup is done, I can immediately do a Restore of the Backup Image file and get the worlds greatest Defrag. The result is that my C: drive is perfectly ordered, with NO spaces in the data field and of course, NO fragmentation.

I've managed to teach a few people to do it and they are amazed by the results.

I want to wish everyone of y'alls a very good 2009!

Shadow

Hi Patio,

Yes , the option is there and it works on 7, at least Maxblast does, as I just tried it.

For some reason, neither of them ever succeeds on Vista, for me , anyway.

I also have Paragon Drive Backup, and the remarkably tiny and efficient Macrium Reflect, so plenty to choose from.

Anyone not familiar may like to check it out - they have a free one available here.

http://www.download.com/Macrium-Refl...-10845728.html

Review here :

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/18794...acrium+Reflect


Hope it helps

SIW2

Ah, I see. Thanks.

I am currently testing Macrium on my benchtest machine...i plan on doing all Windows flavors from Win2K to current.