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Your Personal Backup Strategy

Personal Computing
By yuga / October 25, 2005
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Every now and then, we are faced with a possibility of re-formatting our PC and re-installing everything from scratch. When that happens and we are not ready with a fresh install, you could end up in a nightmare or the twilight zone.

We could be forgetting some important files and settings before we proceed with the reformat. So, before getting ourselves into that situation, a good back-up strategy should be already in place.

What do we need to prepare us for this? A lot of people uses CDR-W to do regular backups. Others still prefer ZIP drives or external HDD. I use a secondary drive. It’s where all documents, files, downloads, pictures are saved or stored. My iPod Photo can also store pictures via iTunes so that’s another copy again (more important files are copied via Windows Explorer).

How about your settings and OS? We’ll aside from Windows XP’s restore feature, I also use Norton Ghost to mirror a fresh install of my Windows XP. That way, If my system got corrupted, infected or just painfully slow, I can use the backup to restore to the fresh copy I have from the secondary drive.

A friend of mine who runs an internet cafe uses Norton Ghosts and he can reformat and restore a fresh OS on all 15 PCs in 20 minutes or so.

You have other personal back-up strategies you’d like to share?

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  • I use a secondary hdd, too, which was initially bought to make a few dvd experiments. On my end, I don’t value my old pc settings as much, since I usually would have cluttered that with too many unnecessary installs, anyway.

  • i use a partition. Norton Ghost is terrific isn’t it? The slightest popup, possible virus infection or otherwise strange behavious I get, in goes the backup CD.

    I’ve been thinking of using 30 gigs.com for storage as well. Blogged about it here.

  • How much did you pay for Norton Ghost? Ahh well… give g4u a try, based on NetBSD, runs off a cd, works well on all filesystems, and best of all its FREE!

    http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

  • I use raw hard disk space. I have a little bit over 1.5 TB in local, network, and external storage. I can recreate almost everything except important documents, and those are mirrored regulary using FTP on a couple machines using a simple bash script.

  • i have my own internet shop where people can discretely surf for porn sites without the hassle of leaving their tracks behind, and of course, spamware, adware, trojan, keylogger, worms and virus are nothing but everywhere..

    so i used a itchy bitchy tiny wini mini software from http://www.faronics.com called DEEP FREEZE.. once installed, everytime you shutdown and restart your computer itll wipe out ALL CHANGES MADE and restore it to its original state (after you reformat or install a new software perhaps) so no matter what kind of virus my patrons acquire or what software they install, there will be no trace of that after you install deep freeze.. and incase you would like to install a new software, all you have to do is to put it in its THAW state so your install would not be deleted once reboot, and then put it back to its freezetate again..

    caution tho, you have to have at least a separate hdd or a 2nd partition in your pc where you can save your documents or install a program that requires updates (like ragna, gunbound) because like what i said, itll wipe out EVERYTHINg everytime your PC reboot..

    questions about this, yo can just email me [email protected] or seach for deep freeze v5..

    deep freeze its a shareware, trial for 60 days, once expired, just unistall it using the INSTALLER itself and re-install again.. valid again for 60 days..

  • kris

    i have an internet shop and i use Terminal Services for all 20 PCs in my shop. that way if anything needs reinstalling all i need to do is recreate the profiles. takes only 5 minutes! 🙂

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