Backing up NTFS drives

M

mfm

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I fully expect to get flamed or belittled for this one, but maybe I deserve it. For the last 5 years of using Win98/98SE on our two PCs, I have never purchased or used backup software. My solution has been, on a weekly basis, to copy the entire contents of the C: drive to another, physical drive in the system (both formatted with FAT32).

For the handful of times I have needed to perform a full recovery of the C: drive I would connect the C: drive and the "backup" drive to my other PC using a long 3' IDE cable. I would reformat the C: drive (along with installing the system files), and then I would copy the backup contents to the C: drive. Worked like a champ! (BTW, the swap file was on a separate partition).

This brings me to the present. I now have two Win2K PCs with drives formatted with NTFS. It is my understanding that my Win98 backup process (however convoluted) will not work with NTFS formatted drives. Is this true? If so, why? If the drives were formatted with FAT32, would my old procedure work?

BTW, I will gladly listen to all suggestions on how to painlessly backup AND recover the main OS drive that don't cost an arm and a leg. :)
 
You could use Ghost and make a weekly image of the drive. It would take about as long as it would to copy the entire contents of the drive, I believe. It's not free, though.
 
I'd suggest using Ghost too. Its great for making easy backups and restoring them. You can chose to save the .img (i think thats the extension..) to your hard drive you use now for backing up, to a cd, and I think you can save over a network.
 
Hmmm, I have seen the suggestions for Ghost and Drive Image for Win2K/WinXP PCs, so I gather that a simple copy and recovery of a NTFS drive is not possible.

Do the drive images from Ghost and Drive Image allow for the recovery of a single file, say one that got accidentally deleted? Or do you have to install the entire drive image?
 
No, ghost is designed to back up entire partitions to a file and restore them from that. Its exactly what you want.
 
If you want to backup the contents of the drive, meaning the separate files themselves, then you can just use robocopy to do that. Ghost would back up your entire install, meaning if the HDD goes bad, you can put the ghosted image on a new HDD. For the files, just making a robocopy bat (robocopy is supposed to be part of XP now, but is easily dowloadable otherwise) and schedule it to run in intervals (or just run it yourself).

See, I suggested Ghost because you sounded like you wanted the whole install to be backed up, not just the files. The files can be copied to another drive on a regular basis just as easily as with 9x (and with robocopy, even easier).
 
Originally posted by GreNME
See, I suggested Ghost because you sounded like you wanted the whole install to be backed up, not just the files. The files can be copied to another drive on a regular basis just as easily as with 9x (and with robocopy, even easier).
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Actually, I liked being able to do both with my setup. If I needed a full backup, I had all of the files. If a file was accidentally deleted by me or someone in my family, I would have a backup copy.

I can easily write a script to backup certain files and folders that I want to quickly recover if need be. For the whole drive backup, it sounds like I need Ghost or something like it. Time for Google! :)
 
Originally posted by Zwitterion
No, ghost is designed to back up entire partitions to a file and restore them from that. Its exactly what you want.
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Actually this statement is inaccurate - at least with Ghost 2003. You can view the contents of your image and extract individual files/folders of your liking to the destination of your choice with Ghost 2003 using the included utility Ghost Explorer. Quite sweet, and very much a lifesaver. I had an install of XP going bad - backed up what I could on CD, Ghosted the drive. Formatted and reinstalled everything. I found after a couple of days of running that I missed a few things when backing up to CD (like my address book). I just extracted it from the image I made. Ghost is worth every dollar.
 
Originally posted by waldog
Actually this statement is inaccurate - at least with Ghost 2003. You can view the contents of your image and extract individual files/folders of your liking to the destination of your choice with Ghost 2003 using the included utility Ghost Explorer. Quite sweet, and very much a lifesaver.
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Now, that's more like it. If I am going to shell out the money for a software backup product, this is something I would want to be able to do.

Originally posted by waldog
Ghost is worth every dollar.
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From what you have just stated, I would have to agree with you! Thanks for the info! :)
 
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