NEWBI: What am I supposed to do?

Hi everybody,

This looks like an easy question to me... and I hope I am not just opening a can of worms.


My intention:
To create a copy of my entire working disk drive so that when it inevitably fails, I will have an easy way to restore everything on a new disk drive unit, and then just get on with life. This sounds too easy, and I truly don’t want to discover hard truths at that point in time.

• Question1: If I use “Paragon Backup and Recovery 2012” from the Windows desktop, does the software make some account for the files that the Windows-7 operating system is currently using? ( My concern is that if Paragon steps over open files, then a restore-to-NewDrive won’t function )

• Question 2: When it comes time (and it will) to restore a burnt and mangled 250GB disk drive to a brand new 500GB disk drive, well the first issue will be to BOOT. What does any imaging software do to handle that?

I am really afraid of making all kinds of backups and incremental addition, and then finding out I missed a simple detail, and can look forward to a 45 hour session of restoring from diskettes. (I am that old)

So any simple help will be happily folllowed.

Thanks,

-Paul-

 

Paul:

I can't speak to Paragon Backup and Recovery 2012 (I use the HDM 12 Suite), but I would expect that it is all much the same.

First thing to do is to create a Paragon Recovery Disk on CD, DVD, or a flash drive so that you can boot and access your backup archive files, which, of course, will be stored on another drive, internal or external. Paragon has its own Recovery Media Builder.

I had a RAID0 drive fail, which knocks the other RAID0 drives out, as they are striped. After replacing the defective hard drive, all I had to do is boot of my Paragon recovery disk, point Paragon to my archive source drive, and in just over an hour, you would never know that I had ever had the problem. Perfect restore, so yes, in answer to your first question, Paragon will ensure your OS is backed up (and everything else too).

As for me, I never bother with incremental or differential backups - don't want the hassle at restore time. I do full partition backups weekly. Set a time when you don't have much to do on your computer and let it run. You can also schedule tasks, but I am too much of a control freak. I like to initiate backups when I want them.

Hope this helps. Have a great day.

Regards,
-Phil

PS: I started backing up in DOS 3.0 to five and a quarter inch floppies eons ago. We've come a long way, eh. Few New Year's parties since then ...

 

Thank you Phil,

Yeah... DOS... I remember that period. Do you remember a product supplied by Quarterdeck? It was a third-party memory manager that actually let you handle two or more programs at the same time. That was such an advancement!!!

I'm guessing a recovery disk will be a boot disk that will be able to see the external unit I will backup to?

Whichever, I ought to get the manual from Paragone and read. I was afraid of spending a lot of time on a solution that wasn't going to address my intention.

Thanks again sir, I do appreciate it.
-Paul-

 

Paul: Yes, the Paragon Recovery Media Builder will see your external device and copy the appropriate drivers for it, as long as it is connected when you actually create the media, which is a boot disk. I use a CD as my recovery media.

Good luck and have a great day.

Regards,
-Phil