Shadow protect questions

Hello I am having my first experience with shadow protect, well In fact new to any image software.To my questions I pretty much figured out most of the program with reasonable understanding, but however I really dont under stand mount or dismount image.
1.Do I leave mounted after my full first full back up.
2.I saved to my local C drive Is that ok or should I have saved else where.
Well thats about it,I am a little nieve here to this type of programs so any tips would greatly appreciated thank you In advance.Dave

 

Hi Dave

Mounting an image is done purely so you can recover files from an existing backup,or because you want to view the contents of a backup.
There is no technical reason for leaving the mount drive active at all and you should dismount it when you have finished the viewing.
You can do both operations from the SP Wizards-Explore backups and dismount backups.
Dismount can also be done by right clicking on the mount drive and clicking dismount.

You should not save the backups to C drive,as the whole point of the backup is to primarily protect your C drive.
If for example the drive fails mechanically ,or some serious problem exists,BSOD,MBR corrupted etc-you may not have access to an image to restore with your SP recovery CD.
Backup to another disk-or buy one.

 

I guess Im stuck on stupid at the moment, I am clearly brain dead. one to many rock concerts I guess

 

That all means I understand what you guys said And was not thinking,go head let me have it

 

Hi Peter..Why not DVD's? I have just made an image and have stored it onto an external HD and, secondarily, to DVD's. I did this because I had more trust in the inviolability of the data on DVD's than in HD's. Is this not the case?

 

AFAIK among others it has something to do with the speed of backup/restore,which is slower with DVD i guess [i never did it myself] and if you have to split image into several DVD,its a hasle to close/open the player al the time,and maybe mistakes can happen with sequence of placing the DVD in there if you do a restore. just my two cents !

BTW here in Europe prices for external harddrives drop dramatically,just bought a Toshiba 500 gig for 65 euro !

 

Using DVD's as second backup is OK, DVD's as main backup is asking for troubles.
I keep my external harddisk OFF-LINE. I can only backup/restore my system and data partition in my off-line snapshot, which has no internet connection.
I only need to backup my system partition [C:] when it changed and that hardly happens, because it contains only Windows and Applications.
I backup my data partition [D:] every day, but only the changes, using Karen's Replicator.
So my daily backup isn't really a big or time-consuming job.

I use ShadowProtect mainly to keep my system partition in a fresh, unused and up-to-date state.

 

I too like and use an external HD for images, but have also used DVDs for over 2 years. It is a good deal slower but I have never made any coasters and found the method to be very reliable. This for both ShadowProtect and Image for Windows/DOS.

 

I think thats a valid point, DVD-CD can become damaged/Scratched to a point where It Is unoperatable,Even missplace.External devices other then DVD-cd are more a reliable source.

 

If you carry out a backup say every day,which you should at a minimum,if only SP is used,imagine the time,cost and inconvenience taken,feeding in one DVD after the other,then the next day-throwing the lot away!
Using rewritable DVDs would make slightly more sense,but even then,time consuming awkward and potentially unreliable,plus you cant carry out incrementals.
As Huupi said -just buy a cheap external drive,if you dont want to fit another internal,

 

yep,thats my plain this week try to find largest external dr at a reasonable price.

 

Try to get a SATA drive and enclosure with eSATA brackets included,rather than USB drive,as SATA is faster and more reliable for backups

All this is assuming of course,that your mobo will support SATA

 

Noted,thanks