I was looking at the backup software I currently have running, and as far as I can tell, the crash restoration portion of the program is disabled for free users. It's there in the program file, but isn't actually linked up. >
Could anyone recommend a backup program that is not too complicated, has crash restoration, is reliable, and is free? I'm currently running Windows XP.
Thanks.
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Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
Sadly most of the decent tools aren't free. That being said, what exactly are you trying to do, and what resources do you have? (For example, do you have an external hard disk for backing up?)
It depends on your definition of 'crash restoration', but what I've been using is EASEUS Disk Copy. The downside is it doesn't do incremental or scheduled backups. However, their site claims to have a free backup solution as well, and I've been impressed enough with Disk Copy that I don't imagine they'd screw up on a backup solution either.
While the occasional bit of Engrish may set off warning bells, I've not once had any sort of problem, just to let you know. And I've restored close on to twenty HDs with it, both from crashes and from simply upgrading to a bigger disk (which it can do, and resize the partition, without forcing me to reinstall Windows). The install package for Disk Copy resides permanently on my emergency fix-everything USB thumbdrive, as a matter of fact: I use it fairly often supporting clients.
http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/index.htm
The backup solution (haven't tried this myself yet, I get by with Disk Copy and a spare HD):
http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/
--sofaspud
--
"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs
I have a 1 terabyte external hard drive, and I'd like somethink that would let me keep my files and programs if my internal hard drive suddenly dies. I've been using Genie-Soft's free back up software, which came with the external hard drive. I'll take a look at Disc Copy when I get home later. Thanks.
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Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
Jorlem Wrote:I was looking at the backup software I currently have running, and as far as I can tell, the crash restoration portion of the program is disabled for free users. It's there in the program file, but isn't actually linked up. >
What the hell?
Without a working restore function, backup software is worse than useless. (At least if you aren't making backups, you know you're on your own. This bit of assholery makes you think you're okay when, in fact, you're screwed.)
Which software is this, Jorlem? I want to make sure I don't give that company any of my business.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
robkelk Wrote:Which software is this, Jorlem? I want to make sure I don't give that company any of my business.
The piece of software I have is Genie Backup Assistant, which came bundled for free with my external hard drive.
Here is a comparison of the differences between the free version and the paid versions.
I'll admit, this is partially my fault for not researching the software as deeply as I should have, but I think it should be reasonable to assume that a backup program will have crash recovery as a basic function. I feel kind of foolish now.
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Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
To be honest, I've been using Windows 7 built-in backup. Works fine.
If you were willing to settle for re installing applications, and just backing up documents, media, and the like (which is a better long term solution, as long as you can reinstall software, but more time consuming), you could use Microsoft SyncToy to set up automatic folder backups.
Hmm, there's got to be a linix LiveCD if you really wanna just back up the partition...
A HA!
Clonezilla
This is the quintessential geek tool, but it's free. Wanna learn a bit of linux?
Edit, a couple of articles on this:
http://mt4.radified.com/2009/05/clonezi ... ution.html
http://www.howtoforge.com/back-up-resto ... zilla-live
*Shruggs*
Windows 7 has worked for me in the past as well. Granted, I've been having trouble with a bug, but that could be because I'm only bothering to backup a select few important files to a flash-memory card I keep plugged into my laptop.
Though it will take something really malicious to take out my documents - I keep them all on a seperate partition so the one thing most likely to bork that is a drive failure. Best part? Common access for Windows 7, Ubuntu, and OS-X. Though if someone can tell me how to get Ubuntu and OS-X to redirect to those files for my documents instead of the ones in their native file systems (like with Windows 7's personal document libraries), that'd be cool.
with a little bit of command line hackery you can do that level of redirection.
let me know if you want me to spell it out.
-Terry
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"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy
For Ubuntu, my google-fu sent me
here (relevant bit is about halfway down). I used that page as a reference when I rebuilt my box last month and put both Win7 and Ubuntu on it. I'm sure there are similar pages out there for OS-X.
Ditto on the unix/linux thing.
If you have an external drive, you could also easily boot of a linux cd and tell it to backup one drive to the other. This, I know first hand.
I dont know directly if you can do the same using an openbox type setup, but I imagine it may be possible.
Disk and directory level backup utilities in linux are very mature, as well as being entirely open.
That leads to cool things like being able to take a backup from a disk that is already having hardware issues, which can result in a backup thats partially corrupt.
But because the resulting file is simply a disk image, you can mount the image and run disk repair tools on it to regenerate things.
This is something that would be extraordinarily difficult with proprietary files.
I had a drive that died on me, the first sectors were entirely
unreadable. Attempting to access the first few megs literally made
clanking sounds.
I was able to use that method to rebuild the missing meg and get every
single bit of my data back.
At the absolute least you could try to get some of your files back.
In the most extreme cases, you can even use open source computer *forensic software* to recover parts of a file.
This is especially true of text files, as their signature makes them stand out very well on a disk even if the header is corrupt.
NifT:
Thanks! I'll look at that later on this weekend. (^_^)
Sweno:
If you have something that isn't covered in the page NifT linked, then yes, please! (^_^) Email me at blackaeronaut at gmail dot com.
Vladimir:
That is pretty cool. I think I'll do the same for my laptop's hard drive.
They cover the needed steps
here under "Keep IM logs and buddy lists synced". Given the common ancestry of Ubuntu and os X, the steps are almost identical.
The three basic rules are:
1) make sure that the drive can be read and written to from os X (this boils down to using fat32, or installing a driver that understands ntfs)
2) move any stuff you want to save (like firefox bookmarks) out of the ~/documents or ~/library folder that they normally live in.
3) quit the program in question and delete the local copy (rm -rf ~/Library/Mozilla/Profiles/default)
4) create a link to the folder on the external drive (ln -s [location of folder on external drive] ~/Library/Mozilla/Profiles/default)
5) launch the program in question and make sure everything works.
one very helpful thing in os x is that any folder you drag and drop into the command line will expand to it's full path, which makes doing things like this much easier.
-Terry
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"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy