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Post your comments for Prepare Your PC for Future Data Disasters here

[SalazrylFishbuuk]

mmm. Nice Article.....

[regulas]

I have one last Windose rig, my gaming rig. When it finally goes it will not be replaced. STEAM supports MAC now and I hear they are working on a Ubuntu platform too.
Between the PS3 and a Mac my gaming desires will be fine, no need for Windows any more. I drool every time when I look at the 27" iMac at Best Buy.

[tkainz]

Excellent article. A few considerations might be to move a few of the post disk image creation items to before the image is created - such as the driver library. To me, having that driver library - even though it will most likely be out of date in a few weeks or months - should be part of that 'pristine state'. Additionally, one other thing which has saved my hide a number of times is to partition the hard drive into three partitons. I use the second partition for nothing but pure data, including my Outlook pst files. The third partition is for my temporary folders, download folders and the like. By keeping all my data on a seperate partition, it makes for easy backup and, most of the time, I have this data 'drive' set up with a sync program such that whenever I plug in the external hard drive I have the equivelent of a simple RAID 1 setup. Additionally, this keeps my Window's "C" drive a lot cleaner and meaner. Finally - ecxcellent point about the dual boot. Having that second OS to work with in the event of a failure of the first is sure helpful plus it's fun to play with occasionally as well. Having the data on a seperate 'drive' also makes it more easily accessible to both operating systems as well.

[Jale]

I was fine with this article until I see the Soluto recommendation. That is a very unstable non-functional monster. I wonder if the other recommendations are in the same vein now...

This post has been edited by Jale: 04 February 2011 - 07:59 AM

[LiveBrianD]

I don't trust the IObit software. http://www.mywot.com...ecard/iobit.com

[mipa]

Best to prepare images in duplicate or you will be sorry! Acronis frequently corrupts the images I have found and they are worthless (especially if made within windows and you try to boot to a CD and use the image to restore). In addition, date should be in quadruplicate--2 hard drives continuously backing up open files, a 3rd hard drive backed up weekly and kept hidden most of the time, and a 4th hard drive backed up about monthly and kept at an alternate address such as your parents. Then if your house burns downs your covered. If someone breaks in an steals your PC--your covered. If an act of god crashes two hard drives at the same time (happened to me several times in last 20 years) your covered too. Expensive? Yes, but necessary.

[Nuke61]

regulas, on 04 February 2011 - 03:04 AM, said:

I have one last Windose rig, my gaming rig. When it finally goes it will not be replaced. STEAM supports MAC now and I hear they are working on a Ubuntu platform too.
Between the PS3 and a Mac my gaming desires will be fine, no need for Windows any more. I drool every time when I look at the 27" iMac at Best Buy.

I have a 27" iMac with a 23" secondary display (in sig) and it's really nice to work with. The method for backup that I use is an application called Carbon Copy Cloner. I have it on a daily schedule to one of my two external drives, and I have a 2nd schedule to do a weekly backup to a 2nd external drive. The neat part is that if my primary drive dies, I can boot directly from either of the backups. I have a similar setup with my laptop... I backup to an external drive, and if the internal ever dies, I can boot up directly from the backup. No need to restore an image, no need to reinstall programs. It's an exact copy of the normal boot drive.

Oh, I run Windows XP in a virtual machine, and the VMs are included in the CarbonCopyCloner backups, so my "Windows" backups are handled as part of the large backup scheme.

This post has been edited by Nuke61: 05 February 2011 - 07:48 AM