Create image Boot Disk vs. On-Line advantages?

I create full images every week to an external USB 1TB HD Drive with TI Home-11 and was wondering if there are advantages (speed, less possibility of files being left out, etc.) by invoking TI either from the Boot Disk or from within Win XP-Pro?

Your thoughts or experiences would be most welcome...

 

I always find it to be quicker when I do a backup from within windows xp. In 3 years that I've done it this way I've never encountered any file corruption or missing files. Doing it this way your using the windows drivers.

With the bootcd (or anytime true image has to reboot) you will be relying on the linux drivers and those can be slow on some systems.

 

The TI Rescue CD plays a very important role. Should you have a virus or disk failure or upgrade, it will be the Rescue CD which enables you to recover.

At the very bare minimum, you should boot into the TI Rescue CD and perform a backup directing its storage to whatever device you plan to use if you need to recover. You need to know that the CD functions for your equipment.

While still booted from the CD, perform a validation on any or all your backups so you know that TI will not reject any of these backups. You need to know that the backups created within Windows will validate and that they will restore.

It is also recommended that you perform some types of restores to make sure your recovery plan is working. There has been too many postings where the backups were made but never really tested to see if the plan worked. For many, this failure to test turned into a data disaster. Testing is safest when done to a spare hard drive.

Any restore of your system drive is best done when booted from the TI Rescue CD. Data partitions can be restored within Windows but restoring your C drive from within Windows is not recommended.

 

I couldn't agree more with GroverH's comments. These VERY IMPORTANT points should drilled into the heads of all ATI users.

Cheers

 

In those 3 years have you had an opportunity to do a complete system restore to a damaged or new hard drive? Doing the backups is easy; the crunch comes when it is time to restore - do all system/application profiles and functions get restored completely and correctly?

 

Yes, if you did a full disk backup, then the restore will put everything back the way it was when you did the backup.

I have used restore to recover from crashed hard drives.

I also do a restore to a hard drive that I use exclusively for a backup
of my system. I first do a backup to an external drive. I then do a restore
to the hard drive I have set aside as my fail safe backup.

If my original C fails, I can just insert my backup drive and I'm back in
business.

 

I've been using TI since version 9 and always do the image of my C drive in Windows rather than using the TI rescue CD. I have never had a problem because of a TI failure. The only problem I had was a restore failure caused by bad SATA cables and that was easily fixed.

I have restored to new hard-drives and often make an image, do some software testing and then restore the image to remove all traces of the testing.

I will also emphasize the need to test the TI rescue CD Linux environment before you really need it. A restore is the place where most TI users come unstuck - they find out the Linux doesn't support their hardware properly.

 

Now that is slick!

 

Hard drives are cheap enough to be have them restored and ready to go.