[BBLISA] Win XP Backup software?

[Larry P. Schrof]

On Sat, Jun 25, 2005 at 11:12:00PM -0400, Carl Alexander wrote:
> > I am looking for a free alternative to Ghost, that handles NTFS.  Of
> > course, incremental backups would be an awesome bonus.
> >  
> > Any suggestions? 
> >  
> > Personal experience, please.....  
> >  
> > (I see tons of things available, but I don't want to try them all.  I
> > want to start with a few personal suggestions, and only try a few.)
> 
> I have a related question but (I think) not the same one.  I'm
> new to Windows (well, using it again for the first time after
> 16 years as a Mac and Unix geek).  I have a Windows XP system
> that I want to swap disks in.  My one odd requirement is I want
> to swap in a _smaller_ disk.  (It's only using about 12GB of disk,
> and will never, ever need more than 2x that; I have a spare 40GB
> drive and a useful place to put the 250GB drive that's in the
> XP machine.)  Windows users I've spoken too seem to think doing
> this would require either black magic or some commercial software.
> Is this really that hard?

Unfortunately, ntfs is quite a bit of black magic itself.  They're just
NOW coming out with write-support for ntfs (in the form of kernel
modules) for Linux, and even that stuff is very much 'Don't blame us if
it mucks up your whole partition.'

In theory, I'm guessing ghost could mirror one drive to a smaller one.
(Or, some unix utility like dd.) Doing it with dd could be nearly
impossible if ghost (or some similar utils) implement any ntfs-specific
knowledge to carry out their duties. You're not guaranteed that every
sector in use on the large drive will be numbered low enough to mirror
onto the smaller drive.

Also, Make sure you don't replace much other hardware at the same time -
XP does hardware ID collection and generates a hash for anti-piracy
purposes.

For what it's worth, when I set up XP, I always do a system-only drive
(with \tmp space and the \Program Files subdirs), and a separate
data-only drive. (I *hate* the fact that 'My Documents' comes by default
on the system drive.) That way, if/when I need to do a re-install, only
the OS and installed apps are affected, and I can leave my data in
place. It also makes it VERT easy to back up my data - point the
software at the top-level folder and say "Grab this whole drive."

I highly encourage anyone reading this message to adopt a personal habit
of saving all Windows programs data onto a separate drive with a
hierarchy of your choosing. It makes life MUCH simpler.

So, to make a short story long, yes, it probably will be quite tricky.
If you can find a free mirroring utility that compensates for disparate
disk sizes, you might be fine. You may have to do a re-install though,
and sift through the data you want to save. Not fun.

Good luck.
- Larry



> 
> ---Alex
> 
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