Advice On Resizing C Drive

Thinking about finally buying this great program but wondering how much I need to resize my C partition to accomodate the two snapshots that will reside there. My laptop C partition is about 14 GB with about 7 GB Free space available.

Would it be wise to allow for future software I might install and would 35 GB size be reasonable to install FD-ISR? Thanks for your help.

Gary

 

If your C: drive is currently 14gigs, with 7 free, that means your setup uses roughly 7 gigs, right? If so, if you allocated 35 gigs to C: you could replicate your current setup 5 times, which obviously you wont want/need to do. You probably wouldnt need that much.

Remember, making archives of your snapshots is quite important for restoration/flexibility. Archived snapshots you would want to keep on a seperate disk/partition, and there is no limit to the number of archives you can keep. So, when deciding on the size that your C: partition should be, take into consideration how many active snapshots you will want to maintain, as this is the factor that will govern how large your C: partition should be.

Hope this helps

 

Do like Peter does :
1. Primary Snapshot = your actual harddisk
2. Secondary Snapshot = Windows + FDISR, that's all (very small snapshot) and disconnect from internet via Windows. This is your refuge snapshot in case the primary snapshot is in trouble

Create an archive of each snapshot and store it on an external harddisk and use your primary archive to rollback in a healthy state.

This is the most space saving solution you can have.

 

What would be the easiest way to create a stripped down Windows XP Pro snapshot since I already have many things installed? Thanks.

Gary

 

You'll need to bite the bullet and install xp fresh- but don't worry, you won't lose your current setup.

On the firstdefense window, there is a tools menu- one of the tools is "create empty snapshot". Choose it, and it'll make an empty snapshot, in which you can install a clean copy of windows xp. After you make the empty snapshot, select to boot into it. When you do so, upon booting, you should get a disk read error- then you know you are in the empty snapshot. Now throw your xp disc in your rom drive, and again boot. When it asks where you want to install xp, do not select to format drive/partition, if you do, you'll lose your current setup. What you do, is to select "leave current file system intact, no changes". Now it'll install xp- after the install, boot into the clean xp, and install firstdefense isr. The next time you reboot, youll get the firstdefense isr boot menu, and upon booting into the fresh xp, youll see all your snapshots, including the one you're in now.

Now you have a fresh xp snapshot, to build other snapshots from as you see fit. It's a good idea to make an archive of this snapshot.

Hope this helps

 

Thanks for your great help in this. Sounds like a lot of setu work at first but pays off in the end. Will continue to consider this program and at lest I have an idea of what would be needed to make it work in an effective manner. Thank you.

Gary

 

I felt the same way to start, but yeah, it does pay off quite well. Once you've got that snapshot of a fresh windows installation, if you ever need to start fresh, or build from scratch to suit certain configurations, you won't even need to touch your windows cd, you just build from your snapshots.

Good luck

 

Pete,

I am thinking of that also. At least Windows would already be updated with IE 7 and other patches. Also, as you have mentioned, it can be used just for a refuge. But I do see the point of a fresh install for other reasons as mentioned but I don't know if I would take the time right now to do that. Thanks again.

Gary

 

Pete,

Do you think I would have any issues uninstalling Office 2003 from secondary snapshot regarding erasing of cache files on another drive and also regarding possible activation problems on primary snapshot? I guess this could be asked of several software programs I have such as Acrobat, ShadowProtect and others - regarding reactivation that is if uninstalled from one snapshot but not another. Thanks.

Gary