Bare metal restore question.

I'm currently using FD-ISR with archives stored on a second internal drive and DVD'S. Documents are on a second partition and are backed up daily.

From what I understand the only scenario I'm vunerable to is hard disc failure and members in this forum suggest products like Terabyte or Acronis for bare metal restore.

To reinstall windows manually, on a second hard drive, from the Windows CD would take about 30 minutes and from there I can quickly import an archived snapshot. What can be gained by adding an imaging product,to my setup, apart from gaining a few minutes or am I missing something much more important?

 

You are correct, your only gain is time.

 

@coquetview

Yes, you can do exactly that for restore to a new HD or the same HD if you needed to reformat.
Originally the full potential of FDISR was perhaps not fully appreciated
I had images prior to finding FDISR.

I have had HD flame out x1, and managed total software bork on more than one occasion in the past the past.

It is just habit for me now to keep an image.: redundancy; I am not entirely happy trusting all my stuff to one solution for such a critical issue.

For me BING from Terabyte has also been extremely useful for manipulating partitions and trials (and errors ) of multi-booting; the imaging comes as extra.
The installs are so small (or not at all !)and the utilities so reliable.
Support is excellent OUTSTANDING for both these utilities
The combination of FDISR and terabyte has been solid for me.

(heh not really dissing but: ATI has been revamped about 6 times and now is massive install while IFW&BING have had 1 minor upgrade since purchase in the same time: & still fit 1 bootable floppy)

I had in the past spent considerable effort organising partitions for OS &Data & photos etc: much easier now with such cheap and superfast external drives to "sync" if I need to and maintain images and snapshots. (although I do trade some speed for size of images and snaps)

The other possibly important feature of imaging for me is "mounting" of images for individual file restoration.

When I am doing a complete fresh install I try not to recreating a clugged up system but for fresh install of everything and pull out the files I may need from my image back-up.

Regards.

ADD:
You wrote here:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=151762

A "bare metal restore" to a different set-up is a different fish.
Acronis actually has a tool: Universal restore; which I have not used but has been given some good press. Symantec also has a tool they claim will work for this.
Storagecraft has mentioned a similar tool in the pipeline.
There are others"\: Paragon, UltraBac.
Issues for a BMR to a new Hware set-up revolve around drivers and Hardware Abstraction Layers (HAL): the various tools have different strategies for dealing with same: but usually revolve around a boot Cd with a library of drivers.

Google "bare metal restore" for a start then google "sysprep" for MS advice.
Google HAL if you want to strain the brain or are v.serious power user.
IMO, again, if I was doing a brand new install onto new box I would be tempted to do a full installation and use my image files to retrieve data for incorporation in a new set-up rather than try and copy an old system to a new box.

I am trying to keep it simple and safe with some redundancy built in.
(I do try and avoid optical storage because I find it a pain. )

just my 2c.
HTH.
Regards

 

Thanks wilbertnl.

Longboard - cheers for your help and for answering my question from another thread.

Great forum here!