Fast, Easy Backups For Win98 / ME / NT / 2K / XP

The LangaList ^ | December 22, 2004 | Fred Langa

[Stoat]

Optimal Drive Partitioning

Dear Fred; Thank you for your fine newsletter and all the great information you provide. I will definitely renew my Plus subscription.
 
Now I have a question that I would like to see discussed.  I have read in one or two different publications that if you're formatting a new hard drive or reformatting an older one for some reason, that it is well to set the drive up in three [3] different partitions.  One for your O/S and Drivers, one for your Applications and one for your Data.
 
Now I can see the advantages of having a separate partition for the data, but how about the one for the applications? Do you do this? How does it help you? Do all the applications that would normally expect to be on C:\ drive run O.K. when they find themselves on D::\ or E;\ or wherever?
 
What do you recommend?  ---Jon W. Spead

Actually, I've found it best to work this question backwards: Start with the backup method you're going to use, and let that determine how you set up your hard drive. That way, your backups will "fit" whatever backup method you've chosen, and you won't be in the awkward position of having to back up a gigantic hard drive all at once, feeding in dozens of blank CDs one after the other. Full explanation: http://langa.com/backups/backups.htm

Best of all, the above article also works even if your PC is already set up! You'll see how to modify things, nondestructively and without having to reformat, so you can benefit from a better optimal hard drive partitioning, too!

Fast, Easy Backups
For Win98 / ME / NT / 2K / XP

Copyright © 1997-2004 Fred Langa / Langa Consulting LLC. All worldwide rights reserved.

---

The downloadable scripts/files appear at the end of the article. But please read the full article; the article contains essential information to understand and use the scripts/files.

Want to Download This Article For Easy Offline Reading?

Table Of Contents:

1) Introduction:
TOTAL IMMUNITY FROM DATA LOSS

2) WHAT’S THE “BEST” BACKUP?

3) PREP WORK: MINIMIZE UNNECESSARY JUNK

4) ORGANIZE YOUR HARD DRIVE

5) TRADITIONAL BACKUPS

6) A MORE RATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR YOUR FILES

7) HOW TO SAFELY AND NONDESTRUCTIVELY
PARTITION AN IN-USE DRIVE

8) BUILT-IN AND ALTERNATIVE BACKUP TOOLS
FOR WIN9X/ME/NT/2K/XP

9) FRED’S SMALL-PARTITION BACKUP ROUTINE

10) FRED’S LARGE-PARTITION BACKUP ROUTINE

11) FRED’S FREE LARGE-PARTITION BACKUP-MANAGEMENT SCRIPT

12) ESSENTIAL INFO BEFORE DOWNLOADING
(and download links)

 

[Stoat]

If you found this information useful and helpful, please consider subscribing to Fred Langa's excellent newsletter...it's free and he won't spam you.

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If you have a better or different solution, please consider posting details here so that you might help your fellow Freepers  :-)

[Stoat]

Backhoe ping   :-)

[ScottM1968]

I haven't heard from Fred Langa since he helped at Byte Magazine.

It's nice to see he's still around.

Thanks!

[Stoat]

You're welcome! I've been subscribing to his newsletter for around ten years and I love it to pieces...every issue has something interesting in it, regardless of what technical skill level you're at.

I hope that you and other Freepers might find this particular information helpful....I believe that the thing that bothers Freepers most ( after Liberals, Socialists, Communists, Democrats, etc.) is data loss, and so I thought that this might be appropriate to post.

Please feel free to post comments about your own backup strategies if you have a particularly successful method that you're happy with.

[JoJo Gunn]

bump

[BigSkyFreeper]

Since I am on dialup, and the slow gnashing pain of having to download the Windows Updates, I've found a site called Software Patch. This is a great place to download the updates as files themselves instead of downloading them at the Windows Update site (for example: The XP Service Pack 2 update alone, takes 6 hours to download on dialup). They have updates for all the flavors of Windows from 98/ME/NT/2K/XP, as well as driver updates as well. Once I downloaded all the Windows 98 update files, I burned them onto CD in the event I have to reformat and reinstall, since Windows 98 is unsupported by Microsoft these days. I even did this for XP, so getting my laptop back up and running again doesn't take hours or days, but a mere hour or so. For drivers, I've set up a Windows 98 folder and an XP folder on my desktop, networked to my laptop, when new device driver updates come out, I update them accordingly.

[backhoe]

Since I am on dialup, and the slow gnashing pain of having to download the Windows Updates, I've found a site called Software Patch. This is a great place to download the updates as files themselves instead of downloading them at the Windows Update site --

Thanks for that tip and the other- will review when head is clearer.
( The Mrs. got a bad hotdog last night & "we" have been up, upchucking, since 1:00AM... )

We take the brute force approach with the 2 PC's at home-- make sure the drives are malware-free, then clone them to a spare drive.

[Stoat]

awwww....very sorry to hear that Mrs. Backhoe is not at her best. Please take good care of yourselves and I wish her a speedy recovery.

[backhoe]

Thanks, Stoat- she's OK after getting rid of the tainted 'dog-- but I guess we had better cross Sonic off the list of places to grab a quick meal.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Bump for later.

[boris]

I now image to an external HD (actually two). I used to use Novaback but found that it did not reliably restore the registry.

Backup to DVD is lame.