A good back up plan ?

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by leoliver, Jul 8, 2007.

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  1. leoliver

    leoliver Registered Member

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    Hi Everyone,

    If I were going to do either a clean or repair install of Win XP pro, would backing up my only drive , with "Exclude all hidden files and folders" and " Exclude all system files and folders " selected be a good back up / restore plan? I'm assuming I would have to restore the TI 10 drive back up, after a clean install.
    Feed-back will be appreciated!
     
  2. DwnNdrty

    DwnNdrty Registered Member

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    Since Windows will need System files and folders and undoubtedly some, if not all hidden files, I don't think you should leave these out.

    I don't understand what you mean by this: "to restore the TI 10 drive back up, after a clean install." If you're going to restore a backup image, there is no need to do an install of any kind since it will be erased during the restore process.
     
  3. leoliver

    leoliver Registered Member

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    I guess I was thinking along the lines of just restoring my programs, documents , music and video files.
    I back up to DVDs so I don't have a current Acronis back up. ( I probably should get a external HD ).
    But for instance, if Windows became corrupted, and it would make no sense to do a back-up, I could do a clean/repair install and use my Acronis back up to restore my programs. But it wouldn't restore recently installed programs, know that I think about it. I guess the external HD is starting to look like must.
     
  4. DwnNdrty

    DwnNdrty Registered Member

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    If you did a clean install of Windows, and afterwards restore a previous backup of only your programs, quite likely the programs will not have the necessary Registry entries in Windows for the programs to run. So you will also have to reinstall the programs.

    Definitely an external hard drive is the way to go - to save backups of the entire system hard drive.
     
  5. leoliver

    leoliver Registered Member

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    Thanks for your replies.
     
  6. pvsurfer

    pvsurfer Registered Member

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    While I agree with eveything DwnNdrty suggested, I might add a couple of points regarding your backup plan:

    Maintaining several entire-disk backups (e.g., grandfather, father, son) is a good precaution against Windows corruption/infection. So even if you find your most current backup is also corrupted/infected, you can revert to a prior backup, etc.

    While I am a staunch user-advocate of ATI, I also believe in "not putting all of your eggs in the same basket", so I also create a backup of just my personal files (data, docs, photos, music, etc.). I happen to use WinRAR to archive them, burning them to CD afterwards, but you could just as well use Xcopy, WinZIP, or a dedicated file-by-file backup program. That way you can recover your personal files if and when you have to replace your computer!
     
  7. GroverH

    GroverH Registered Member

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