I just finished reading Bill Mann's book, "How t

[Peddler]

I just finished reading Bill Mann's book, "How to do everything with your tablet PC". He dedicates a chapter to backing up your tablet. The message is very toward backing up a Tablet over backing up a standard notebook. My thought was to use Ghost and an external 80G drive.
What are you using for backup?
Does anyone have some experience with Ghost and the Toshiba M200 tablet?
Is there any issue using an 80G 7200RPM external to back up the 60G
5400 RPM drive in the Toshiba?
Does Ghost do a complete backup then only add the changes with each follow on backup?
Thank You in advance for your help.
So far the Toshiba M200 has been an excellent machine.
Peddler

[dcpetral]

i use a seagate 160GB external hard drive for backing up my tablets. i haven't used ghost for the last year (at least for my acer, nor my toshiba), and simply back up all my files. that's basically because i don't find there's too much 'crap' software installed on either my acer or my toshiba (the stuff one always dispenses with right away when setting up a new computer), and i don't really have any programs i use on a regular basis besides office, macromedia mx, and adobe acrobat --- all of which are easily installed.
i would highly recommend the drive i have, for a number or reasons: 7200 RPM / 8.5ms read time, one-touch backup button, 8MB cache buffer, tons of space, fairly small and quite portable. and compared to other drives with as much speed and cache, this one gives you the most bang for the buck! you can get it at dell right now for under $240, i believe.

[Armejia]

Thank in advance, is it possible to make Backup whit CDWR?. Would you tell me how? Or only whit removable hard disk?.

Thank you.

[The Chief Nerd]

For me personally, I use an external 120GB (7200 RPM) USB 2.0 drive to make backups of my files, etc. on my tablet. I use the included backup utility that ships with XP Pro. It's not a terribly feature-filled backup utility, but it does the job well and it automates the job for me so I don't have to worry about it.

[drzeller]

I have posted two or three times to find anyone that has used an external harddrive with Ghost on the M200, with no luck. I am thinking either I am the only one that tried or no one has succeeded. My challenge has been to get the external drive recognized when booting to PC-DOS with Ghost.

D.

[Wcrocker]

I use an external hardrive for backing up my tablet (Maxtor's 120 Gig model) but have never used it with Ghost. The one touch backup function works great. Like you I'd love to see if someone had succeeded in getting it working with Ghost.

[John Land]

You need to distinguish between file backups and image backups. An image backup makes restoring all files AND the registry *relatively* straightforward. A file backup (e.g., using SecondCopy or similar software that allows backing up only changed files) makes restoring inadvertently deleted files easy using standard file management tools. However, unless you use a product that snapshots your registry from time to time (SystemSuite 5 has *2* such programs included; however, don't forget to backup the snapshots!), if you need to replace your notebook harddrive, a file backup won't restore the registry and you'll have to reinstall ALL of your apps. If you use a registry save/restore program, the procedure would be to reinstall Windows, copy all of your files from the backup to the new disk, then run the registry restore program.

Note that this second method is NOT a good way to move apps from an old laptop to a new laptop, because you likely will wipe out any new software (including drivers) that comes pre-installed on the new laptop. However, you can copy all of your files from your backup (this may copy a number of personalization settings, but normally not all) and then reinstall your apps.

A lot of mavens advise only backing up your "important" files -- don't bother, you WILL miss some, and even if you don't, it often takes an ENORMOUS amount of time to restore all of your apps (I have *hundreds*) AND update them to the most current version (I don't think I have a single major app that can be restored to its present state using only the original CDROM's) AND reset all of your customized toolbars, schedules, preferences, etc. Backup everything. With modern disk sizes, external backup is cheap.

One strategy you might consider: buy an external HD about twice the size of your laptop HD; this allows you to split it into 2 partitions, then save alternately between them -- an A-B strategy. This won't help if the external HD itself crashes, but it allows you to save 2 backups, increasing your chance that the older one is OK if the newer one gets corrupted during a backup (you verify after backup to be really sure this didn't happen) or simply contains a copy of a file version you really wanted if the current version you just backed up has been *adversely* edited.

Hope this helps.

[John Land]

A second strategy to consider: use a double-size external HD, partition it into equal halves, use a file backup program to copy to one partition daily (SecondCopy can sync up my 52 GB of files in about 5-10 minutes, most of that being two large email files -- 1 GB and 2 GB -- that get changed daily) and use an image backup program (I don't know if Ghost works) weekly to back up to the second partition. If your laptop craps out, restore from the image, then use something like BeyondCompare to find out what's different between the restored image and the last file backup -- then selectively restore those files of importance (e.g., work files).

[drzeller]

wcrocker - what software is used by the drive, and does it perform file or system backups?

I am under the impression that the only way to get a complete system backup is to boot from another OS or partition. I wonder that the smallest OS I could load onto the tablet would be that would support the USB harddrive. It would be great if there were a "mini-XP" load!

D.

[Wcrocker]

The OEM software is called Retrospect Express made by Dantz. It performs a standard backup and also a duplicate image of the source volume your choice. You are given an option to create a bootable CD.

Have I done that yet? No. Still flirting with disaster a bit. I have used both the backup option and the image option and that's about it.

[EMRhelp.org]

What are people doing to back up their M200s ?

As discussed there are two main issues
(1) backing up important files
(2) backing up an IMAGE of the entire M200 hard drive.

I have been using Acronis True Image for making image backups but I haven't actually "tested" it. Always a recipe for disaster. Admittedly my M200 has had little problems for the last 3 years, but still. With the images, I figure I can always pull out the M200 hard drive and put an Acronis True Image backup on the hard drive and plop it back it. (I think!)

Note: True Image does both image backups and file backups.

Words of Wisdom ?

I also use FolderShare (www.foldershare.com) to Synch my files now. Works very well.

[bmhome1]

I have been making drive image backups using Acronis True Image (v8 through v10 now for Vista) since 2003, counting easily into hundreds with an aggressive policy of frequent backups of the entire OS partition kept current and erasing outdated archives in rotation.

I have restored full XP OS from those images at least 25 times (probably double) and used TI extensively back in Vista beta experiments numbering similar times.

In all those imaging tasks and later random actual OS restores there never was anything but perfect outcomes without even the slightest hint of an issue. I have 100% trust in TI to perform always, as it has proven to be.

Restores can be initiated running live (the Linux based tool auto loads in RAM on restart) or booted from similar tool CD (burned with TI). The drive images to USB external drive take less than 1 minute per GB OS size, so task takes only minutes for SO MUCH protection and safety net doing so provides.

I can't imagine the fear, tedium and wasted time facing full reinstall from scratch without one.

[EMRhelp.org]

Ah ! A True Image fan - nice taste :)

How would I load a .tib file from a USB Hard Drive ?

[bmhome1]

The .tib (drive image) is just a big fat file. They are freely moved, copied, burned to disk or kept all in one folder anywhere. TI gets pointed to the desired .tib archive same as any file. The GUI design intelligent enough mounting .tib from any source.

The beauty of TI is its extreme simplicity and flexibility. One can fully use without ever reading guide. The software design is one of the very best, restoring whole OS made easy. Remembering to make the archives is the hard part.

BTW, only point needed is the demands of making drive image makes direct burning to disk far less reliable than 1st to a hard drive then copying image to DVD.

[Carl]

I use a combination of:


Mozy unlimited backup to a third party server farm: http://mozy.com/

and

Microsoft Foldershare to a desktop computer at home: https://www.foldershare.com/

[bmhome1]

Realize that a drive image restores entire OS partition precisely back to archive's timepoint. No patching pieces back together, a total erasure of current issues and clean OS restoration back to known good state, now even faster from reordered defragmenting.

Nothing is lost (except later date files), nothing to reset or reregister. Such true total restores are also incredibly fast: 10GB OS size completed under 20 minutes to back running. 10 window clicks and two reboots total task.

[sneezinglion]

I set up a file server in my basement and use this tool:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/synctoy.mspx

to backup only those directories that I need/care to have a backup of. The base OS, and installed programs are easy to install, but my personal data is worthless. Whoops! I meant priceless.

[Digital]

Going back to the original question about using Ghost I have used Ghost 9.0 to create a back up image of my C drive both to a network drive and to CDs and DVDs and have been able to restore from all of them using the Ghost boot CD. As others have said, that's not the same thing as doing simple data back up which I have also done with Ghost, Acronis and the XP back up tool. But I keep my data on a logical D drive which makes things a bit simpler as I can back it up without worrying about the OS as it is on my C drive

[John Land]

For both my original M200, and now my M400, I do the following (all of my work is on these machines, a backup is critical):

1) When at home, I do a daily file-level backup of the entire tablet I've been using (M400 currently) to an external drive attached to my desktop computer and reachable through my network (wired or wireless, depending on where I am in the house). Backup progam: SyncBackSE (syncs only changed files, and copies the XP registry). This takes about 10 minutes.

2) When on the road, I do a daily backup of ONLY my work directories on the tablet I've been using to (a) the external drive mentioned above (the one attached to my home desktop computer) via FolderShare and (b) to a thumbdrive (using BeyondCompare, but I could use SyncBackSE). The first backup helps if my laptop AND bag is lost or stolen, the second one helps if my laptop just dies -- I have my critical work related data on the thumbdrive and just need a computer and some common programs to keep working. Both backups take less than 10 minutes together.

Recommendation: do NOT leave FolderShare running all the time, but only start it for backups. That way, if you accidentally delete a local file, you can use the web access feature of FolderShare to fetch your backed up copy; otherwise, if you leave FS running, it will propagate the inadvertent deletion to your backup copy.

3) About once a month, and especially before every road trip, I clone my internal laptop drive to an essentially identical (size, capacity) external USB drive using Acronis True Image. This takes about 3 hours for a 100GB HD (95% full), which is why I don't do this more frequently. The result is a cloned drive that I can literally drop into my machine and boot within 5 minutes (had to do that one morning when my usual drive glitched badly just before I had to run off to the airport). And most of the time is spent unscrewing and screwing the drive from the external case into the internal holder.

I tried cloning once with Ghost 9 and tested it and it failed -- WinXP Pro saw the cloned drive as Drive D, and wouldn't boot all the way because it was looking for most of its files on Drive C. Acronis TI knows about this problem and correctly sets something on the cloned drive so that it is treated as Drive C when you boot from it (even though it was Drive D when I made the clone through a USB port). Ghost 9 is OK if you boot from its disk (a problem with the M200, of course) and copy a cloned image from an external drive to an internal drive, but this takes hours to do for a 100GB drive. Acronis TI is the better program for my needs.


In summary, the combination of a monthly cloned image AND daily file backups allows me to restore EVERYTHING of importance rapidly: drop in the cloned drive to get fully operational immediatly and to have all data, updates, and settings from within a month, and copy changed data files to get mostly up to date (any new programs or updates installed since the last clone will have to be reinstalled or downloaded and applied, but all data files will be up to date).

I really can't stress enough the importance of cloning a complete image as the primary backup, and a drop-in cloned disk (as described above) is better than storing an image file on a disk that you can't drop in. It is NOT an easy or a short task to reinstall, update, and tweak all of your software (it will take you hours just to reinstall and update Windows XP unless you have a slipstreamed updated version), and that's assuming you have a fast internet link and all your cdroms, passwords and keys handy.

Lastly, as you put all of your photos, videos, music, Quicken data, and other irreplaceble files in electronic form, think about levels of disaster: what about a fire or flood or hurricane? My brother and I will shortly be setting up secure, Internet accessible drives for each other, in California and Alabama, to cross-store backups of truly precious files to address this problem.

John Land

PS: Macs make this problem SO much easier, as I found out with my wife's machine -- they can boot off of a backup copy attached via Firewire, and complete restoration is a matter of copying files.

[John Land]

An addendum to my last post: I just bought the HD adapter tray for my M400, and used Acronis True Image to clone my internal 120GB (95 GB in use) drive C: to a 120GB SATA drive mounted in the tray. Cloning time was 1/2 of the time (90 min. vs. 3 hrs) to clone to a PATA version of the same drive via USB.

John Land