Re: Boot Disk
- From: Rock <rock@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 13:24:46 -0800
Annie wrote:
I have Windows XP. I heard that u should make a boot disk and a back up disk of your information but I just cant seem to find what Im looking for. Do I need a boot disk for XP or just my operating system CD? Where do I go to make a back up disk for my computer?
A boot disk is not generally needed. The XP installation CD is bootable. As to backing up, XP comes with Ntbackup which is installed by default in XP Pro. It's in Start | All Programs | Accessories | System Tools as Backup. In XP Home it's not installed by default, but it is on the installation CD in the \MSFT\ValueADD\Ntbackup folder as ntbackup.msi or download it from here: http://www.onecomputerguy.com/windowsxp_tips.htm#backup_home
Ntbackup has some limitation. Ntbackup cannot backup to DVD and will only backup to CD if other 3rd party CD burning software is available and even with that it will not span CDs, i.e. one CD is the limit, which is not very practical. It is geared toward tape drives or other hard drives. It will work ok in backing up to an external hard drive (or network drive) and restoring individual files / folders is ok, but if you need to restore the complete drive it's cumbersome. XP must be installed first. If you have XP Pro, Ntbackup has an ASR feature (Automated System Recovery) which makes this restore of a boot/system drive easier but still it takes much longer than an imaging program, and I never got it to restore my system to full functionality as it was when the backup was made. It also mandates that a floppy drive be available. One floppy disk is created in the ASR process and there is no way around that. ASR is not available on XP Home addition.
One backup option is simply copying data files to a CD. Zip them up to make them smaller if you want.
An excellent backup strategy is to use an imaging program. This makes an exact image of the partition which can be saved on CD/DVD or to another drive - internal or external. Imaging to an external USB 2.0 / Firewire drive works well. Then occasionally burning an image to DVD gives you redundancy. Restores can be done of the entire partition or individual files / folders. These work well and make it easy to recover from a drive crash. Examples of this are:
Norton Ghost 10
Acronis True Image
Terabyte Unlimited's Image for Windows
Terabyte Unlimited's BootIt Next Generation (BING)
CasperXP
Another option is a traditional backup program such as Stompsoft's PC BackUP or Sonic’s Backup MyPC. They are good tools. - and the evolution of ntbackup. There are other good backup programs out there as well. This can do a complete backup or backup individual files and folders to DVD/CD and other drives.
--
Rock
MS MVP Windows - Shell/User
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