Hi, I got caught big time Tuesday with Win7 System Image restoration. Used a bootable pen drive to boot a Hirens CD Image from thumbdrive. Wanted to try and format an 800GB USB connected SATA drive as FAT32 using win98 for a Media Centre. Anyways, it for whatever reason trashed my boot manager/sector of the INTERNAL sata0 drive, so 7 would not boot. Also has sata1 drive with data. At the exact same time, this site was down, so i used micro$oft site to glean the boot sector restore commands, they didnt help, so thought, stuff it, i'll recover my C:\ (OS) drive from the 'System Image of C:" I diligently create every Friday thru the "Backup & Restore" GUI. Ran up the 7 OS DVD, chose to recover from a saved image. It forced me to select both drives in the GUI. Hit, GO, and after it completed happily, and rebooted, I had my O/S back and booting (7 Ultimate x64), but every partition I had, had been formatted. I had on disk0, Win7 - 118GB, Data - 750GB, Mirror - 110GB I had on disk1, Data - 860GB, Mirror - 110GB Both Disks were DYNAMIC to allow the mirror to be created. The partitons were all there, but all were totally formated/clean!! Running any all tools I normally use to recover lost data were useless, as they were not happy with the Dynamic Disks. So I could not recover 1 scrap of data from either of the disks. Lost the lot. Lesson learned. Now running ONLY Basic Disks. POS M$.
Sorry to hear that, Macrium reflect free edition will not format your drives. The only drive that gets formatted is the target drive for the restoration.
I have Macrium Reflect, and was going to use it prior to this (or Ghost), but it also does not deal with Dynamic Drives. Also, all versions of Cloning software on Hirens CD DONT fully support Dynamic Drives, so will never use Dynamic ever again. Hence whyI went with the O/S provided solution in the 1st place - POS. Ghost would Image the Drive/Partition, but not restore to a Dynamic drive, etc. Another half baked attempt by M$ to do something that others already do well.
I always felt nervous about Windows backup, just have more faith in companies that have been doing it awhile like Acronis, etc.
Never had that problem myself. I have three partitions in my HDD but it only formats and restore on the drive that I assigned to format and restore.. I used it twice already and never had a problem. But better yet, back up the other two partitions so better that way that feel sorry later
That's not true in my opinion. Storagecraft's Shadowprotect desktop is AWESOME. And is often recommended by people who have used Acronis.
Sorry for your loss. I use Acronis 2010 for my backups. I was going to try to backup with Windows but after reading this I think I'll let it pass.
Windows B&R works fine, never killed any of my partitions and drives. Just used it to do a P2V migration of one of my DCs.
This may sound lame but i've lost touch as i've not been playing with softwares for sometime. I used to us Ghost and i boot it from a floppy drive. From there i would select an image file and just restore. Those day it was Win98 & XP but i don't think it supports NTFS....or maybe it does. Anyway, what is the latest version to this Ghost where i can use it like i used to. Maybe booth from thumbdrive or CD? Advice would be great.
Heard that once upon a time Ghost was THE king of disk backup software, but in recent versions Norton screwed up, long-time users lost faith and now Acronis is one of the better alternatives. Another safer way is to back up before backing up. That's right: copy all your essential stuff (emails, media, documents, images, chatlogs, bookmarks, downloaded programs, game saves, work etc) to another place (thumb drive/DVD/physical hard disk/online storage etc) before actually doing some major backup. Always assume your backup process will fail. So even in the unlikely event that it does, your losses will be kept to a minimum. Paranoia will serve you well.
I know backups are essential these days. But to be honest, never done that, and never needed to (read : at home). All data is stored seperate from c: and d: drive (dualboot), and besides an occasionnal reinstall (bout once a year), everything stays up and running. When problems arise, i allways tend to fix the source instead of just doing a reinstall. I have 6 seperate disks hooked up, so backing them up is just way too comprehensive. So should i make the jump, and start backing up my c: drive only ? But as i never use system restore, or something similar, and never had data loss before, is it really gonna be worth the effort ?
It can't hurt to have an image of your system disk =) With Storagecraft's ShadowProtect Desktop, you first create a full image, then you can set a schedule where it saves the changes made since that full image, to smaller images (you can make a new full image from all those + the initial full image whenever you want). It is probably the easiest way I can think of to keep your system image up to date. It does a sector comparison to create the differential images. This is space saving, as you don't need to backup the entire file that was changed - only the sector on the disk that the change occupies. Yeah, and I find that when I need to finally replace a disk, then that data is usually very old and hasn't been accessed for a long long time. So I'll mostly just shelve the disk. People seem to have a paranoid tendency to think that they will need every last bit of data that have ever accumulated. Most data is only useful for a limited time. I have stacks and stacks of old cd's with data that I thought I absolutely couldn't live without. I have yet to pop them into the drive, and to be honest I can't think of anything on them that I would use for anything anymore. The data on them belonged to the time period where they were created - nothing more.