Backing Up A Full OS

Ok, had a bit of a glitch last night, nearly lost everything but recovered.

I used to be able to take a Ghost Image of a hard drive after I had loaded the OS, Drivers, and Main Stream applications; however, with the larger size in disk space, and the still small media back up methods, this no longer will suffice for my 80GB drive.

How would one go about making an image of a 20GB partition of an 80GB drive, store it, then restore it later if needed without erasing the rest of the 80GB drive? Last time I did this the programmed erased the entire drive to recreate the 20GB partition, I wasn't so happy.

Suggestions?

I've been able to do this, if both partitions are considered primary. However, you would be doing yourself a great thing if you got a second hard drive, and used the 80 GB as your entire C drive. Then you could keep a copy of your Ghost image on the second physical drive, and also on DVD/USB Drive, etc.

Anytime you are doing a major drive operation, it's a good idea to have everything backed up, just in case. If you don't want another internal drive, get an external USB one. Then, back up your second partition to the external drive, restore your image (also can be stored on the external drive) and then you can restore your data from the external as well.

I used to have an external USB drive for my wife, and she'd use SyncToy to quickly backup any of her data. She does the same now, but I have it pointed towards our server at home instead.

Hmm, thats what I was afraid of.

Right now I have the 80GB in three partitions, C, D & E. XP is installed on C as usual, but My Documents is stored on D so I dont have to back up every time I reload XP. I guess its time to get a external drive just to keep a backup of the OS on. It is so much easier to do an image overwrite than to have to reinstall everything.

I guess I will have to re-examine how I have my system setup, maybe you have some suggestions.

Currently:
80GB PATA Drive
C: O/S
D: Pictures/My Docs
E: Misc
200GB PATA Drive
F: ISOs
250GB PATA Drive
H: Download/Storage
300GB SATA Drive
K: Media

So how do you think I should configure this setup?

If that was my system, I'd do this. I'd ditch one of the hard drives, either the 80 GB, or pull one of the PATA drives and stick it in an external cage, for backup purposes.

Now, I'd find the fastest drive, and use that entire drive as my C partition, aka system volume. Then, I'd use one or two of the other drives for storage, and that's it. Each drive would have only one partition.

In your current example, you aren't gaining anything by partitioning your 80 GB into 3 partitions. If the drive fails, your docs are toast anyway. Over-partioning doesn't solve anything. Call it personal preference, but I never put more than 2 drives in any non-server. Considering the amount of data you have stored, you should have some sort of backup strategy for all of it. I might have to revise my answer here. This is what I would do for your system:

C: 200 GB PATA = OS, apps, and games.
D: 250 GB PATA = Data Storage, and backup of user data on C, such as .pst files, game saves, etc. (Can be simplified with SyncToy).
X: 300 GB SATA drive in an eSATA cage = Backup of data and storage of things, lke .ISOs that don't need to be online all the time.

I create a folder called _Backup on my D drive, and use SyncToy to dump all of my userdata from C to it. Then, I build a second routine in SyncToy to copy all of my data from D to my server. You could do the same to your external drive, or just Ghost the whole thing to an image file on your external drive. Lots of options there!

I realize if the drive crashes I dont have a backup of my docs, it was setup like this simply because I was redoing XP a lot there for a while, testing some automation disks and stuff, and at the time I didn't have the larger drives.

I think I will make some attempts here to redo things, I think I saw a SATA cage for sale in the forums, see what I can find, and 500GB are $100 now, might pick one of those up. I have no real need for a sever, that would just be more space taken up in the house, and a waste of energy.

If I had one PC to backup, I'd probably go with a cage as well. I'm only using the server, because my wife is in school to be a web developer, and I can also play around with server admin tools, all while backing up two computers and a laptop to it.