vista and xp pro

will buy this when new version is released(vista). But i have a few questions before.
here goes i have a 200GB H/D and an External H/D 250GB.
two partitions of
C:drive 39GB(used 29GB) windows/few software.
D: drive 34GB(used 27GB) software.
the rest of my HD is for data(not interested in them)

so what i am wanting is two snapshots 1 with my current system i have now ie windows xp pro and then another which i create a blank snapshot with vista on.

so i can go from one to another because as we all know vista is not perfect at the moment.

my question is if i create the blank snapshot with vista on what space does it take up? do i have enough on the c/d drives? or do you backup the snapshots to an external drive first then do a blank one?
i can not get my head around all this thanks looks good software reading this forum.

 

Hello kazuki

First of all, we are talking Vista x86 here, right?
As you know, FD-ISR currently only allows bootable snapshots on a bootable partition. The next version should fix that. I am not sure, but I think that even the latest version (1.10.173) allows installation of Vista in a blank snapshot. As I already intended to try that anyway, I will do that tomorrow and repost back here.
I had Vista in dual-boot with XP and it took approx. 8Gb on a partition (don't have a clue why so much), so you barely have enough space. But since you want to wait for Vista version of FD-ISR which announced ability to boot from other partitions, you don't need to worry too much.

Cheers.

 

I have Vista and XP in two different snapshots. My system has of 2 10k rpm 76 gb Raptors in Raid 0, and a 750 gb storage and backup drive. I also have a 750gb external drive for backup of my storage drive. My system drive is partitioned into C and D. C: contains Windows and Program Files and D: contains Data, ie, My Documents. This way, I can access my data using either XP or Vista.

To answer your question, my XP snapshot takes up 9.17gb and my Vista snapshot takes up 13.07gb. These are probably bigger than most people need as I have many programs installed. Pretty much the same things are installed on both snapshots.

I am seriously considering dumping Vista. After about 2 months of use, I find it much more "in your face" than XP and not as responsive. I use the Vista Transformation Pack on XP and get all of the visual features of Vista along with a stable and responsive OS. I think I have a good blend of security programs that make XP just as secure as Vista. I have never had a major virus or Trojan problem.

 

so am i right in saying your vista and xp snapshots are on the same drive,so that would be 9.17GB+13.07GB or can you backup to an external HD then restore which O/S you want?

 

I suppose you could do it that way, but it seems like a cumbersome way to accomplish the same thing.

In my case, both snapshots are on the same partition.

I keep FDISR archives of both snapshots on an external drive, plus I use Acronis to backup my system partition to an external drive. Acronis backs up both the Vista and XP snapshots, since they are on the same partition.

A full backup of the 22 Gb system partition takes less than 10 minutes (one of the advantages of using 10 k rpm drives with RAID 0). I use normal compression, and my full backups use about 13 Gb of space.

I use a program called Superflexible File Sychronizer to backup my data files in the D: partition to the external drive. Second Copy is another program that does this operation very well. They both backup only the changed files and only take a few seconds to backup.

 

ok thanks silver, that was what i wanted to know, so basically if you had 1 partition (c:drive) of say 40GB. one snapshot for xp the other snapshot for vista. Both the snapshots are on the same partition at the same time, you just click on which O/S you want to boot up into is that correct? then i could do the same for the D drive where my software is say another 40GB. I am using rollback rx8 at the moment which is brilliant and doing a dual boot with vista which is another partition.

 

That is correct. However, I do not think that you can use RollbackRx on 2 partitions. I also use RollbackRx v8 for it's quick snapshots for experimenting. If I decide to keep a snapshot, I then use FDISR to archive it's snapshot to the external drive.