Wrong drive letters - how does this affect differential backup
I do a full backup using boot disk (linux) because it is far quicker than in windows. As drive letters differ from those in Windows, am I correct in assuming that subsequent differential backups MUST be done using boot disk (linux) method also. Presumably if I do a differential backup in windows, it will not be able to compare drives properly i.e the drive letters will not correspond. Or is there a magical way a windows differential backup will work.
John:
Drive letters are not an absolute reference to a partition. They are assigned by the operating system in use. If you had two Windows operating systems on your disk (Win XP and Win 7, for example) then each OS may have different and completely arbitrary drive letters for the same partition. One OS could be configured to show a data partition as D: and the other could be configured to call the same partition Z:; it's totally arbitrary. So when running the TI boot CD you may see different drive letter assignments than you see in Windows. So what. Do not be concerned about this. To make a human analogy, drive letters aren't like given names. They are more like nicknames. One person can call you "Bubba" and another could call you "Buddy". Different nicknames but both referring to the same person.
If you want an absolute, unchanging way to refer to a partition, give the partition a name, or look at the size. Use one of these to identify your partitions when backing up or restoring.
Do not worry about what drive letter the TI boot CD uses to refer to a partition; go by some other method of identifying it. When you restore a partition, Windows will see it with the same drive letter that it had before.
You can do differential backups in Windows to a full backup that was created from the TI boot CD; there is no problem with doing that. I do it every week.