paragon, backing up from within encryptd envronment

to all,
just some experience I've had, with testing WinMagic/SecureDoc encrypted environment, with using Paragon from within windows, in teh encrypted environment, to back up to an external drive, for later disaster recovery. The backed-up-external partitions are unencrypted (lock them up in a safe, if sensitive data), but a new drive could be built (in event of disaster) and re-encrypted, for your operatiingmachine.

I have NOT finished all testing yet; I had prior used acronis, but am investigating alternative backup suites, and paragon appears to be very promising.

I have installed Windows 7 on my tablet PC, and that comes with a backup
utility (windows system backup). I tried that backup, and it did back up
the c: drive and MBR, but I have no way to restore it to an alternative
drive so I can test if the restore works, and their BACKUP interface is
somewhat cryptic, and it does not see all avaliable drives that the backup
can be sent to.

I then tried Paragon Disk Backup FREE version, to test it. I installed it,
interface is better than the Windows 7 (but I had it on an XP machine). I
backed up MBR and C:, from within encrypted environment. I then restored it
to an alternative USB drive, so I did not overwrite my existing workable
machine drive.

It restored the C: drive (I am not able to test booting of this drive, due
to equipment limitations), but I was able to open this NTFS partition and
see my files (I did not do a file comparison)

I then installed the FULL version of their HDM 2009 disk management suite,
to my tablet (this is their paid version). Interface is nicer than the free
version, and I was able to produce, from within the encrypted system, a
backup of my MBR, C:, d:, and F: drives, to an external USB device

I have NOT mounted or restored THAT image (I am out of time this weekend),
but PRELIMINARILY paragon looks like it can possibly be a backup solution
from within WinMagic. CANNOT confirm this until I am able to restore the
image to the operating drive (or a spare drive and then mount the spare
drive, but equipment limits me from doing this right now)

I DO have a spare 80-gig 2.5 inch SATA drive, and my tablet now has a
160-gig satqa drive in it (c: partition is 80 gig), and if I can get a SATA
external 2.5 enclosure, and put this spare drive into it, and hook it to the
SATA port, and try and boot from the external sata drive (not sure if it can
be done within bios), then I could test the restore of the emergency backup,
on a bootable hard drive

re: WINDOWS 7, system backup/restore, again not able to restore (their
limitation) to anything but the mounted original (or replacement ) drive, so
can't use a spare drive for testing (I CoULD use the spare SATA if I bios
can handle an external sata)

Anyway, thought you would like some info on alternatives, to help with
testing

nick

 

Thanks for the info - please keep us updated.