Can anyone recommend a good backup software for a PC runnning Windows XP please? Preferably something you have used and found to be effective.

You mean you guys don't backup your PC's? - I'm sure you do, so please help me out with some advice here.

Nero

Once a week I just burn a known collection of files to CD/RW. If everything falls down, I'll just reinstall Windows then drag the content of the CD over again. Other than that, system restore works fine for me (well I presume it will, should I ever need it)

Greg Moore

In my case, 13Gig of changing files > 640MB CD = Error !

What I want to do is periodic full backups with regular differential backups which can provide restore preferably without having to reinstall all software (inc downloaded patches, upgrades etc)..

I have found GoBack (http://www.roxio.com/en/products/goback/index.jhtml) to be a valuable addon to Windows.
Windows System Restore is a nice idea, except I've never had it restore much of anything. GoBack, on the other hand, will put everything back exactly as it was.

A feature of XP is "Restore" which seems similar to but not as compehensive as "Go Back", but both use information stored on the existing hard drive. I want a facility that allows recovery in the event of a complete hard drive failure/replacement.

You might want to look at Norton Ghost then. It's one of the few norton products I don't own, but I've never heard a bad word about it from the people I know that use it.

Greg Moore

yup use Norton Ghost 2002 to clone an entire drive in 4 - 25 mins :)

i also have a 2nd and 3rd pc as backup with copies of all my files from my main pc

read the best guide on the net at http://ghost.radified.com/ghost_1.htm :cool:

I never even setup windows anymore... I just setup my Win2k box, updated everything installed the drivers, and made a ghost image :D

Norton Ghost is one of the best tools out there....

All my scripts that I do are stored on two drives, the first one is what I write to normal, the second one is a backup drive that has an archive made every 12 hours of the first drive...


And about once a week, I back all my scripts up over to my FreeBSD box :D

Thanks for the advice, Ghost looked good but in trying it there are problems with XP. Althought Ghost 2002 is stated to be xp compatible it requires booting from DOS via a boot disk.

When I make the boot disk I cannot work out how to boot from it in XP - you can't restart XP in DOS!

Also XP uses NT file types and it seems that Ghost can't work with them - anyone any ideas please?

Originally posted by grandad
Thanks for the advice, Ghost looked good but in trying it there are problems with XP. Althought Ghost 2002 is stated to be xp compatible it requires booting from DOS via a boot disk.

When I make the boot disk I cannot work out how to boot from it in XP - you can't restart XP in DOS!

Also XP uses NT file types and it seems that Ghost can't work with them - anyone any ideas please? read the link i posted

i'm using WinXP Pro and Ghost2002 works fine and can be booted from when you create the MS-DOS boot disk

Originally posted by eva2000
read the link i posted

i'm using WinXP Pro and Ghost2002 works fine and can be booted from when you create the MS-DOS boot disk


I did check your link - thanks for the help. I experience 2 problems:

1: Cannot get to true DOS in XP {Quote from link ... To CREATE an image: Launch the program [screen shot] from (true) DOS}

2:If I try to boot up from the boot disk I get the message telling me to remove the disk!

Any suggestions as to what I might be doing wrong please?


Also what's wrong with the below syntax???

Actually got a bit further by trial and error and managed to get the programme to load, but now have the following problem:

XP originally partitioned my drive to C: in NTFS and D: in FAT32 - Ghost 2002 does not see C:, it only sees floppy drive A: and the FAT32 drive D: - which it calls C:
Also it doesn't see my external USB drive (FAT32). As a consequence I cannot select the source drive C: (NTFS) or the destination drive (USB FAT32).

This is of course all being done in MSDOS.

Any ideas .... anyone? :confused:

I use the built in backup function in Windows 2000 Server. I get it to copy the backup files from my Win XP machine to a network location every day and then once a week or so I burn that to a CD.

Norton Ghost 2002 seemed the best option but will not work with my Windows XP - it doesn't detect all of my drives (see post above). If anyone has Ghost working with XP I would like to hear from them.

If anyone has any other good backup suggestions I would be most grateful. I am looking to backup my entire hard drive to external USB drive and then do regular diff/incremental backups. This is a laptop and is not server related.

Please help if you can.