Testing image by restoring to another partition

[Dag]

Sorry if this has been covered before. I've tried to search, but haven't found the answer.

My harddrive has two 200GB partitions - c: which has XP and all my programs and files on it, and d: which is sitting there empty. I've made a disk image of my c: partition on an external USB2 harddisk using Ti 11. The image file verifies ok and I can access the image, both from Windows and from the rescue CD, and extract individual files from it.

However, for complete confidence in the backup I understand it's a good idea to see if you can actually restore the image. The idea mentioned in this forum seems to be to restore the image to a second hard drive and boot from this. While I'm sure this is the best way, I don't really want to buy a second hard drive just to test my backups, especially when half the old one is sitting there unused!

So my question is this: Can I restore the image of my c: partition from my external USB2 hard drive to the unused d: partition, test to see if this works (maybe not boot from it, but at least see the restore complete without errors and manually check that the files are there), then format the d: partition and see no changes to my system? I'm not all that technical and I'm afraid I'll leave XP confused as to which partition is active/bootable/has the MBR (or any other term I don't fully grasp :wacko:) after I'm done.

[visch1]

I personally have NO experience using a USB for images. However my experience using TI10 with internal drives has been quite satisfactory using another drive as a test and immediate boot drive if needed. First I make my C drive around 30G-40G so the image is on the smallish side and a small less expensive second drive can be used, I happen to use a 500G second drive. ALL items like photos, MPs, videos etc would be on D and other partitions and be backed up on the USB unit. I save my images on D AND another accessible drive if the emergency TI boot disk is needed, like if C won’t boot. I also make an image about once a week as I never want to load the OS from scratch again along with all the needed items.
:thumb:

[Xpilot]

Hi Dag,

At the moment you have a single backup layer. It does not matter how many backup images you have on your external drive. If that drive were to fail you would be back to having no backups at all. This would not be a disaster unless the drive you are backing up also failed.

My view is that one layer is not enough but two layers make one's system and data virtually fireproof if arranged properly. An additional hard drive could be used not only for proving the integrity of your backup process but it could also provide a second layer of protection.

This is how it works:-
You remove your current internal drive just as one would if it really had failed. Put the extra drive in its place plugged up just like the old one. Connect the USB drive and boot from the TI recovery CD.
Well that is it you could stop there. You have a new working drive in the computer, a proven backup USB drive and importantly another ready to go hard drive which can be safely put aside to cope with whatever may befall.
It is of course a bit of a chore to swap over main drives to update the spare one and prove that your latest version or build of TI still works.
I used to do just that. Every time a new build came out, at one time they were every few days it seemed, I would swap over my main drives. I then discovered internal drive racks and caddies which make swapping drives over nearly as easy as putting in a new DVD.

Have fun .
Xpilot