Partition Software

Hairy Coo,

No. I create incremental images daily and they are only 50 MB. When I restore it's for some software that has gone wrong so I'm only restoring to yesterday or the day before.

You and I create images and do data backups in the background so that is no effort. Restoring an image is minimal effort but my computer restore downtime is less than yours as my image is much smaller.

It's no trouble. Data just goes to the D: drive in the same way as your data goes to the C: drive. In addition to My Documents, I keep my email store, address book, Outlook pst, Temp folders, favourites and bookmarks in the D: drive. So when I restore my OS for software reasons I don't have to use Karen to restore recent data as well. So that's a time saver too. I've had a few HD failures and would recover from this situation just as you do. But for OS restores not due to HD failure I certainly appreciate my data files being in the D: drive.

 

Well best of Luck,Brian if its all convenient for you
greetings from Avalon

 

I wondered which Northern Beaches you were from. Great spot. I'm from Lennox Head.

 

Iodore,
2 questions.
In a previous post in this thread you mentioned what would go onto the different partitions. I've often wondered where, as an example, my OA2 and Avira would be placed. With the OS or in a different partition?
And in the quoted post, you are naming a few different products.
Do we need a bunch of products to accomplish images etc.?
Aren't there any that would properly do all of the needed functions?
Thanks.
Hugger

 

For anyone interested in using another partition for their data, this is how you do it.

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=49222

 

Hello Hugger,
for backup and restore you only need one application and the best atm is shadow protect desktop.
online armour2 and avira would go on the system partition.
only data and music go on the other partition.
some programs dont like being on other partitions.
lodore

 

Thanks for your help.

 

To Beethoven:
Still exploring options: good stuff
Your Q's
1: Any closer to answer? Some good responses here.
Some perceived advantages some so/so.
I dont: I have OS and data on "c" but use FDISR and imaging.
I can mount my images to retrieve individual files if req.
2: You can partition prior to installation of OS either Windoze or Linux.
Yes you can repartition after MS OS installed.
3: The 'suite' from Terabyte: BootItNG with IFW/IFD is imho the sine qua non, the nonpareil of tools for Partitioning and imaging.
Free Trial but not sadly free: cheap for what you can do.
Heh: somewhat stark GUI but representative of the sheer utility of these apps.
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/examples.html
http://www.heffy.com/image.htm
Using BING you will also learn a lot about how 'stuff' works.
(As usual apologies to others: not spamming - again- )
As noted other good tools mentioned here.
4: Install, Run from Boot discs or combination.

Good Luck

My simple set-up
HD0:
C: OS and data and fdisr snaps
D: Movies and Photos and docs.
G: VMs
HD1: ( external USB; off when not needed and physically disconnected)
J; Images, full data back-ups, Full install.exe Back-ups, FDISR archives
K: Linux Isos
HD2: ( External USB)
L: Movies and photos and docs, FDISR Archives

Prolly clumsy but works for me. Easy to take stuff with me.

 

Thanks Longboard and everyone else responding above - this has been very helpful.

I have not quite finished my planning yet but at this stage I tend to think I will not bother with partition. I will keep my OS on one drive and have all of my data on the other drive.
I will save FirstDefense_ISR snapshots on the C:drive with the OS and will need some space for this anyway. Have not yet decided if I will install imaging software in addition as I am still not convinced it's a must have (given that I will rely on FirstDefense_ISR) .

It's good to know that I can partition later on if I change my mind. Knowing me chances are low that I will install a second OS anyway.

 

FirstDefense_ISR will be of no use to you if you have a hardware failure of your OS HD. A backup image on another HD will allow you to reconstruct another first HD.

 

I accept that, Brian. Just not sure if I really need to cover every eventuality. In the case of a hardware failure, my recovery would take longer but I would still be able to use the archived snapshots though not for immediate reboot.

 

Excellent advice from everybody. Heres a free windows partititon manager - SwissKnife

http://www.compuapps.com/download/swissknife/Swissknife.htm

You could make a unattended xp cd and edit the winnt.sif file to this

[GuiUnattended]
ProfilesDir = D:\Documents and Settings

so it installs that folder to that location instead of c , this keeps your entire data off c .

also keep your Program Files on d

[Unattended]
ProgramFilesDir="D:\My Program Files"

This all enables you to keep your system partition small and no loss of data if c goes down or you decide to wipe it in a hurry.

Heres a nice little guide to show you easily how to do this.
http://winhowto.blogspot.com/2006/06/how-to-change-locations-of-program_29.html

The advantage of this it already setup once windows is installed and no folders to move or registry entries to make.

So i'm left needing to backup my important data on D. I have another drive with Raid 1 for that which anything copied to D is mirrored to a partition on drive 1 and as a extra precaution i backup important data folders to an external. forget D:\Program Files backup this doesn't contain important data and most software has to be installed again for it to work properly in windows. I could have all software on C and image all of C so i don't have to install the software again but this defeats the purpose of keeping C small and taking fast image.

 

You got it.