Acronis Ture Image

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

As most of you know I am building a PC shortly. I was going to have two operating systems and one drive and data on the other aswell as having a regular back up of the OS drive on the second drive.

I was thinking that I should have one drive with the OSs and data on and having an external drive to make a backup of the OS drive with Acronis True image on the external drive.

Is either way more beneficial? or is there no difference?

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

The most important thing on your PC is your data, if you lose the OS provided you still have the install media reinstalling isn't too painful but if your data gets corrupted then your backups need to be spot on or its gone.

I'd say run 2 operating systems on one drive, data on a second and backup the data drive to USB (if you get a big enough USB drive then you can take a regular image of your OS drive as well)

 

Cheers for that

 

np, data paranoia is what I do

 

Rather than mirror my drives, I made the decision to keep an "offline" drive with a recent backup of my data. The choice of whether to install a ghosting app like Ghost or Acronis, or to just do a copy of your most valuable data is entirely up to you.

 

Thats what I was thinking. One drive for the computer and depending on the frequencies of installs and system changes back up the system using Acronis to an external drive that only gets plugged in when I need it.

 

I would use Acronis to image OS partitions (remember to ALWAYS validate the Acronis images, I never used to bother until I tried to restore my main machine one day and found the image was corrupt ). Just copy and past stuff in a data partition to another drive to back it up. You could use Acronis but it makes one big file out of everything, one big file is more susceptible to corruption than all the little data files you put in to it. You don't have much choice on OS volumes, however I wouldn't bother imaging a data volume. Also keep at least two copies of everything on different drives if your really data paranoid.

 

I have four drives and a fifth - USB - drive.

Drive 1: Vista and 'critical' applications
Drives 2 & 3: Striped array - User area folders are located here, as is the installation location for 'non-critical' applications
Drive 4: VM Images, Iso's for various applications, misc data
Drive 5 (USB): Generally, backups, but occassionally additional information.

I actually dont backup my system as much as I should. Although now that I have a new digital camera, I may have to actually start doing so more often.

I did however, gain benefit from my setup this weekend. After pissing around with services a few months back, I managed to break both VMWare, and my AV. Coupled with a ridiculously slow boot time, most of which was spent staring at a blank screen, I decided to rebuild.

I used Acronis TI to back up my OS drive and the array, then booted to the vista installer. I formatted Drive 1 and reinstalled Vista on it.

I'm actually glad I didnt format the striped array, as was my original intention, as this allowed me to remap the vista user folders to the folders on that array. This meant that I didnt have to restore my user data from backup. Prudently getting SP1, and the hardware drivers before rebuilding also helped, as this allowed me to get up and running quicker.

Within 2 hours of formatting, I was back up and running with vista, office, msn, and firefox. The core of my requirements. I still havent reinstalled TI, nor vs2008, but those can come with time. VMWare is back on and running though.

 

So I will image the OS drive and copy the data drive stuff to a spare drive, sound like a good idea.

 

you must have a lot of data

 

not really. but 1. I wasnt paying for the rig, and 2. I like the separation of the data from the OS files, for more or less exactly what happened this weekend.

 

I see the benefits of keeping the data on a seperate drive although I don't generate a lot of data.

I have a load of videos and will get more (all legit) and I do a lot of word documents, and I have Virual PC setup.

 

There is another advantage - access speed. If you are running the OS off one disk, and a vm off another, there should be a performance benefit (apparently), since not all disk read/write activities are being queued to the same disk.

 

good point, I'll stick with the original idea OSs on one disk data on the other.