Any suggestions to my KISS procedure?

I’m a sort of a paranoid Win XP and Vista user, BOTH on separate hard drives, and each having a duplicate separate back up drive of its own. My object is to never have to load either OS from scratch, so I save the first several images (TI 10) of each OS “forever” on a separate partition on each drive. I make an image of each drive about once a week and keep them on both respective drives. After imaging to the non used drive it becomes the active drive for the coming week, etc.
The imaging and restoring take less than 10 minutes as my “C” is a partition of around 15Gs with the OS using around 7Gs resulting in an image of around 3-7Gs. All my MPs, video, apps, and pictures are kept on other duplicate partitions on both OS drives. One reason I only image C is over the years when needing a restore it’s been the OS that died. If a drive dies I’ve still got its twin to plug in, in less than a minute.
Any suggestions or anything I’ve overlooked? THANKS

 

Could you give a bit of detail on the physical arrangement of your drives ? As I understand it you have four HDDs. Are these all in the computer and you make changes by plug swapping or something completely different?

Xpilot

 

I have 4 drives in the range of 500G each, 2for Vista and 2 for XP in a built in the box 5 bay housing. Most of the time only 1 drive is hooked up at a time, the others disconnected by removal of the power plug. As time goes on I only save the first 4 or so images for the time I feel the newest are getting bloated. I usually keep the last 5-7 images and trash the one 5-6 weeks old. Perhaps I'm keeping too many past ones? But storage is cheap today looking at my latest 5 yr warr. 750G drive, esp compared to the cost of my first much more costly 80MEG drive.

 

I am not happy with the idea of having all my HDDs in the same basket. The end result of what I do is simillar to yours but I have a rack fitting in the tower which takes exchangeable drive drawers. This means that my duplicate drives are physically separated from the computer and are thus safe from fire,flood pestilence or lightning strikes that might befall the computer.

Instead of keeping my backup images on the drive that I am protecting I store them on an internal secondary drive. I use the secure zone for its added protection and its simple automatic creation and management possibilities.
Apart from that I think we proceed in the same way:- A backup image is run, the current drive is put safely away, a previous drive is inserted and a restore is run.

Xpilot

 

You just cannot beat the removable tray idea (called mobile racks by the vendors) for a quick change of drives and for easily keeping your backup away from the system. Cost about $10 ea.

 

In order to describe my drive setup I described it as above. In reality the 2 XP drives are in the main box and are not normally running at the same time. XPs image is in both drives AND a seperate one. Same situation with the Vista drives till I get used to it and it settles down. The only difference is the Vista drives are in a open portable 3 drive frame with a 8 cm fan blowing on them. Obviously I have no children or others to "investagate" "what's this for"? I might add that awhile ago I learned to LABEL EVERYTHING! It's so easy to slide down the tube of confusion.

 

Removable racks are what I use.

And I real world test each clone. Oh yeah, if only 1 choice image or clone. I chose cloning.

Unless you really restore the image or test the clone. You're just wishin' an a hopin'.

 

Thanks everyone. I recently started making images of Vista on a new motherboard with a Core2 Qued, its different from the P4 in that every time I made a image using Windows and put it on the other drive the ORIGINAL would not boot even though they never ran at the same time. Using the boot cd got me past that conflict BE WELL