Backing up and entire drive in Win2k

Perhaps someone has a good answer for this.

I wish to backup my Windows 2000 installation onto a physically separate hard drive EXACTLY as it is on the boot drive. Though, I want to be able to exclude certain files, such as, .avi, .mpeg, .mp3 etc.

What I'm looking to do is be able to take that exact copy of my boot drive and write it overtop of the original in the event of a system disaster (which just happened to me) and, minus the excluded files pick up right where I left off from.

So, if physical drive C is my boot drive I want to back up to physical drive D. Even if drive C becomes totally deleted I want to plop the image of it right onto the disk from a command prompt and be golden.

I tried using Winrescue but with the security permissions in Windows 2000, Winrescue did not seem to do the trick, especially, since it need a configuration file in order to run, which was on the crashed drive. Winrescue seems to only be good for backing up spreadsheets and Word documents IMO.

Anyone have any good recommendations? Money is really not object when it comes to my frustration.

 

Money is really not object when it comes to my frustration.

In that case you might want to consider changing your OS to the server version (you didn't specify so I'm assuming 2K-Pro and it won't do mirroring) and then setting up to use RAID level 1 (mirroring) so that you have two identical copies of your system partition. Then if one goes bad, it takes just a minute or so to break the mirror, tweak the backup so it becomes bootable, and reboot. Presto, you are exactly where you were before the failure.

If that seems like more than you really want to do, imaging software like Ghost will allow you to make an exact copy of the system partition to CD and you could easily reload from that if things went bad.

 

Thanks newt. Using a RAID 1 setup would mean a system failure (ie ******* up system file) would be transferred to the second disk right? I think Ghost may be the way for me to go since I can back up to a physically separate drive.

 

Me again. Just wanted to pass along some good info I found in case anyone else stumbles across this thread.

Ive started using Acronis True Image 7.0 to create an exact image of my boot drive. There dooesn't seem to be a way to exclude certain files but that's okay. The backups are only about 2GB with everything in the WINNT, Program Files, and Documents and Settings folders being compressed and stored.

This program works the treat. Norton Ghost requires you to backup from a DOS floppy disk so it can grab all the files and it uses a **** load of switches from version 2002 that are completly confusing even for a CS major.

Acronis can do it right in Windows while your working on something else, or when you shut down the computer. To create a restore disk you can use a bootable CD whihch Acronis will even burn for you. In my case I use a slower 40GB drive to store backups of my system on. To test Acronis I put the Windows 2000 install CD in and formatted my boot drive from the repair console (I know I know risky... but I wanted to make sure it really worked before I installed everything). This wiped the operating system and all other files on that drive out.

Then I popped in the Acronis Restore CD I made, and an impressive interface popped up that almost looked like the Windows GUI. It is very easy to navigate. I restored my recent backup in about 2 minutes believe it or not, rebooted again and Windows loaded up flawlessly.

I must say I am very impressed with this peice of software. And the scheduling feature along with not having to go into DOS to backup are awesome.

 

Thanks for posting back. I think the chance that others will look at this thread searching for answers is around 100% so the information should be valuable.

I think you are right about imaging software being a better solution for a PC-type system. RAID1 is great for a system where up time is the key since it takes just a minute or so to recover from a blown drive and is more automatic so easier to manage with lots of machines. For a single PC and the things you want to do, imaging to a drive seems better.

 

Hello, I would just like to add my twopennyworth to the debate.

I use Ghost extensively at work mostly for sysprepped images for about 70 machines that consist of 4 different models, so I only have that many ghost image files on the network.

I do have a couple of odd machines however, (my own included) that I have created separate images of.

The way I create odd images needs a dvd writer. I use ghost to create an image to another HDD or to a network location, then use DVD writing software to create a bootable DVD that contains the image and a copy of the ghost.exe file.

For the boot files I use a win98 boot disk
(Available from here) and add the line "ghost.exe" to the end of the Autoexec.bat file. You can probably add switches to the exe to load your image automatically, but I havent bothered to find out what they are as it only takes a few quick keystrokes to do the job manually.

As long as your machine has a dvd-rom, you can boot from this and it will automatically go into ghost. It should take around 5 minutes to rebuild about 2Gb of data.

There are lots of other ways of safegaurding data, all of them good and effective, but this one is cheap and easy.

Hope this helps