Questions about drive backup express free version......

[KoRnGtL15]

First off. It seems to be a great product. Now I have never used a program like this before or backed up any thing. I went ahead and made a backup of my hd to my external usb drive. Now a member on the previous board had a question that was never answered. Which is my same question.


As a completely new user of Drive Backup (free edition), I would like to know whether, when doing a restore, it is necessary to erase and reformat the hard drive, or will the restore overwrite what is already on the disk.

Thanks,
Leland

I also have another question. I am thinking about adding this program to a netbook. I created a usb recovery media. Am I able to use that same thing on the other pc in case a recovery is needed? 1 last question. I am running XP Home SP3 on both machines. If I happen to need to recover. What do you advise the easiest way? Stick the usb media in and boot that first? Then boot the external hd? Then how would I restore that onto my internal drive? With that. I am talking about if the system would just not boot into windows at all.

[Paragon_Tommy]

-{ Quote: "First off. It seems to be a great product. Now I have never used a program like this before or backed up any thing. I went ahead and made a backup of my hd to my external usb drive. Now a member on the previous board had a question that was never answered. Which is my same question.


As a completely new user of Drive Backup (free edition), I would like to know whether, when doing a restore, it is necessary to erase and reformat the hard drive, or will the restore overwrite what is already on the disk.

Thanks,
Leland

I also have another question. I am thinking about adding this program to a netbook. I created a usb recovery media. Am I able to use that same thing on the other pc in case a recovery is needed? 1 last question. I am running XP Home SP3 on both machines. If I happen to need to recover. What do you advise the easiest way? Stick the usb media in and boot that first? Then boot the external hd? Then how would I restore that onto my internal drive? With that. I am talking about if the system would just not boot into windows at all." }-


Hello KoRnGtL15,

It is possible to restore your partition(s) onto existing partitions or unallocated space. In the restore wizard, select the archive then destination of where it will be restored to. In the following screen, you can choose to adjust the new partition to a larger size if adjacent unallocated space is available. The old partition will be deleted, a new one will be created for the restore, and size is adjustable to its surrounding capacity.

With a USB recovery media, you can boot into the software from the media environment and perform a restore without the operating system present. Simply plug in the USB media, change BIOS to boot to USB or hit F12 during POST. Depending on how many USB ports your netbook has, always best to plug in both the external and USB media at the same time so the recovery environment detects your external hard drive. With one USB port, after hitting "Normal Mode" quickly swap the USB ports. Perform the complete restore, check if partitions are archive, update MBR, and restart computer.

Also want to keep in mind that if the image was created from a different machine and restored onto a computer with dissimilar hard ware, Windows might not like that and prompt for driver installations and so forth.