When You Say "Back-up", What Do You Mean?

On a slightly less philosophical point, the issue of what a backup – however you take it - actually protects you from is salient. Does my backup protect me from:

a. disk corruption or hard disk failure
b. catastrophic PC failure, fire or theft

If a., and a sector-by-sector restore (as opposed to a file restore) was taken, is this restorable to a different type of disk (i.e. if my type of disk has been discontinued)

If b. what happens if a replacement PC with a more-or-less identical motherboard is not available? The standalone restore may well work perfectly (or, alternatively, I might need to cut a new standalone restore CD) but the restored operating system may lack the basic drivers to boot. OK – if I have taken a file-by-file restore I won’t have lost user data, but I may still have a several days outage while I rebuild the entire software environment (especially if I am using Windows).

So – depending on what I am trying to protect against (and this involves a bit of simple risk assessment: e.g. someone is more likely to steal my laptop than my tower PC), I need to decide whether I use TI or use Echo with Universal Restore?

 

Dear Xpilot;
Is it "along way off" or "a long way off"? Since it does not seem possible for you to stop this sort of inane silliness from oozing out of you, I will not read any more of your responses but will hope that others will choose to discuss these ideas if they can show me what might be a better way.

 

It all boils down to your individual risk profile as was mentioned earlier. Mine is likely not the same as yours or perhaps many other people.

The relatively cheap HDs available for backup mean that there is reduced benefit in trying to be frugal and doing a lot of navel-gazing on what to backup. The other rule is that if you back it all up, then you have all that it is possible to have.

Where the above comes unstuck is that if you backup huge amounts of data that take a lot of time then you are less likely to want to do it. Automation can solve this issue to a large extent such that a backup is made unattended late at night for example. Incremental backups are another solution.

My risk profile says I store the files I deem important in a certain area and they get backed up nightly. Files that are in the "don't really care if they disappear" category are left in the scratch area (anywhere else on the PC). It also says that I image C (OS and apps only partition) when I feel like it and if it were lost forever it wouldn't be the end of the world since I don't run a business from my PC and I have all the install stuff either on CD or in my special area that is backed up. In fact, it is likely that if I rebuilt the OS and apps from scratch it would be about 25% smaller than it is now because of the stuff I no longer use or need.

Acronis does have a feature they call one-click restore but I don't bother with it. HP can easily do the one button trick because they will totally wipe the HD including any partitioning you did, install all the crap to the factory config, will not allow you to resize the partition, will not let you do selective file extraction and restore.

I get somewhat amused at the efforts people go through to do things like one-button restores, don't want to boot with the rescue CD so work for hours on other schemes. It's not like we are restoring systems to new HDs every day. I use TI to image and restore before and after software testing and I find running the process from Windows to be fast and easy.

 

I am unable to find much in your responses that furthers my understanding of the difficult task of safeguarding a carefully built up computer system from intentional or inadvertant corruption. Since this is an Acronis forum I thought someone could shed some light on this. I was wrong. Even a basic question about the generated "Rescue Disk" file structure seemed to confuse the Acronis responder. 'Putting in a blank disk ...' as a response does not answer my question. I was able to rumage around and find the answer but I don't sense that the furtherance of knowledge is the goal of this forum. I withdraw the question. Good Day

 

The goal of the forum is to help people who have issues of one type or another using the features or lack thereof in True Image. While the practical aspects of keeping ones disk data safe from HW failure, theft, malware and other unwanted hazards encountered in normal use are discussed, it certainly is not intended for navel-gazing, philosophical discussions that you seemed to favor.

 

Very nice! Now that is true and FUNNY!

 

I'm with you.

I check my navel every evening in the shower. That's often enough.

Off to better threads.

 

Excellent! A fitting end point for this thread.