System Backup.

[Falcor]

I want to make a bootable reinstall disk or disks whatever it takes of my OS at an optimal point. Just looking for suggestions on what burn prog to use or maybe someone knows a specific utility for this task.

[Death-Dude]

Decent question. Of course, since XP, 98, , 200, have bootable CDs, that solves one problem. A buddy made for me a disk that used the boot image of a 98SE start-up disk, and included several nice apps you may want to include in a typical build, I use that for installing. You can use Isobuster for extracting the Boot Image, shareware. When backing up stuff, I don't care much about the apps, as I have the software. Even most updates aren't worht backing up, as I have a fast connect. However, I encourage you to back up:
Mail Box and Address Book - very easy with Netscape Communicator, you can do an export with Outhouse
Drivers - it is very nice to have the drivers of all your hardware ready to go at install.
Game configs - OMG, how long does it take to rebuild all of those? and so small just to back them up.
Saved Games - or at least you one or two most recent
Also, Documents, projects, music you'd be sad to lose.


Boxes are coming more and more without floppies, but I always keep a couple of boot floppies with CD-ROM drivers in case I do an older machine that has no CD, or has no CD boot option in BIOS. I have my old HP 10X CD-RW to use as a temp for those machines.

[OUTLAWS Behind You?]

I'd recommend Norton Ghost. It will burn a bootable restore CD of your disk or partition image.

[<<Hybrid>>]

Nero can burn bootable discs, too :)

[Falcor]

Thx for some good suggestions guys. Was checking into it a bit more, does anyone know how well the built in backup utility in XP works. It provides an option to make a system recovery backup, using a 1.44 floppy and then whatever other media is required to contain the rest of the data.

[Yellow[GummiBear]]

I&#39;m not sure about the built in backup thing for XP but I use Norton Ghost.... personally I think it&#39;s the titties&#33;

[OUTLAWS Behind You?]

Originally posted by Falcor@Jul 15 2003, 01:48 PM
Thx for some good suggestions guys. Was checking into it a bit more, does anyone know how well the built in backup utility in XP works. It provides an option to make a system recovery backup, using a 1.44 floppy and then whatever other media is required to contain the rest of the data.
Something doesn&#39;t sound right. The built in backup will back up to 1.44 floppy or SCSI tape or hard drive. It does not make anything bootable, even the 1.44 floppy. At least I&#39;ve never seen or heard of that. :WTF:

[UncleSam]

Definately check into Norton Ghost. You can take an image of your system at any point for recovery sometime and then reload it using the ghost.exe utility that comes with it. It is great for making a baseline image Before you hose it - :P

[Fred Bear]

I have that Nortons ghost thing but have never used it. I should considering how many times I have reformatted my hard drive because of some kind of screw up. How does it work? I have a 40 gig HD, how many cd&#39;s whould that take and to what condition would it restore it to?

[OUTLAWS Behind You?]

The number of CDs needed is dependant on the used space, not total space. The restore is to boot to the first CD. Ghost then rebuilds your hard drive to the exact point of the backup. :thumbs:

[Fred Bear]

does this include preferences nad installed games and such? Or would you have to reinstall all of that? What about email addys and stuff?

[Morpheus]

Originally posted by Yellow[GummiBear]@Jul 15 2003, 03:39 PM
personally I think it&#39;s the titties&#33;
like your avatar... :w00t: