Hard Drive image to DVD's
sorry there doesn't seem to be a search function on the forums.
anyway i wish to create a image of my hard drive on to DVD's rather onto a hard drive much like you create rescue disks when buying new machines.
but i can not find a option to do this? i have just purchased acronis true image 2010 which suggsted it was possible as i want to do it before upgrading windows vista to widows 7 in case anything goes wrong. That way i don't have to do any updates etc and reinstall any software/files and settings.
is there a way of doing this?
my hard drive is 18.9GB in data size so will need splitting across 4 or 5 dvd's.
is there a tutorial or can some one post an idiots guide, sorry i'm a little old.
Kind Regards
Simon
I will warn you, if you have to do a restore from…… wear out the drive's tray before you are done.
I would like to hear more about this ---- I have used the bootable version of 2009 and now 2010 . I known that in 2009 I was able to and have run 3 or 4 disk sets and to re-install I have started at disk 1 and gone all the way to disk 3 or 4 as the case might be without having to put any of the disks back in . I should mention that in all cases I make full images and do not do any incremental backup to the original image.
I will warn you, if you have to do a restore from the 4 or 5 DVDs you run the risk of driving yourself crazy inserting and reinserting the various DVDs. TI does not read all of one, then the next, etc. Joke is that you will wear out the drive's tray before you are done.
This is a gross exaggeration. This is how it works, and by the way, I have been backing up computers for 30 years now and this is basically the ONLY way it can work when you have files on multiple media.
1. You put the last disc in. (this is something that knowing up front eliminates an extra disc swap)
2. The software can now show you all the files that are on the whole set. The reason you put the last disc in, is that the backup software writes the whole directory of what you backed up at the end of the process and therefore puts it on the last disc.
3. Now you select what you want to restore. As another poster said, if you restore everything, you mount each disc once and then you are done. I suspect that your issue is restoring random files.
4. Now you select the files you want to restore and the software will prompt you to insert each disc in the set that is needed, one at a time.
Hardly seems unreasonable.
Now, to address to your "solution", there are some reasons why your advice is not necessarily the best or safest solution.
While the cost of Hard Drive's is very attractive, you will probably not want to buy multiple hard drives to do this. Especially if you can fit multiple backups on to one. This part requires an explanation of depth of backup which is the first reason I will list.
1. Depth of Backup - While many people will back up their system once and then (in the case of a hard drive) write over the backup with the next one, there are many pitfalls to this. For one thing, if you have an automated backup, and on Tues. evening your system gets infected or files that you need are lost or accidentally deleted and then an automatic backup runs on Tues night, you will wake up on Weds with a system in need of repair and a backup that will only take you back to after the event that is causing the problem. Another pitfall is off-site storage. We should all be aware that you should have a backup off-site somewhere at all times. Even if it isn't the latest. If you have a fire (or in the case of a HD attached to the system all the time) a theft, you are going to lose your system AND your backup (unless the thief is kind enough or careless enough to leave your external drive behind). So without multiple (more $$$$) external drives you lose off-site capability and have a limited depth of backup. Even if you do create multiple versions of your backup on one hard drive, you are still subject to something that I haven't mentioned yet, failure of the external drive. If it goes, all of your backups are gone. While DVDs are not indestructible, you can easily see that having multiple versions of your backups and having some stored offsite, greatly reduces the chances of all of them being bad. Yes, you may end up with a slightly older backup, but in the case of a crashed external, you have NOTHING.
2. Space and value - Given that you can password protect the DVDs, you now have a backup that takes up very little room compared to an external hard drive and you can put them almost anywhere without fear of someone stealing them and having access to your awesome stuff (we all have awesome stuff....don't we?). If a set gets lost or destroyed, no big deal or expense. If you do use multiple hard drives, you will have to be more careful about storing them, as there IS value to someone else in the device, and it may "walk away" on you, losing you your backup(s) and the cost of the hard drive.
3. Durability - this may seem like somewhat of a rehashing of stuff above, but just to clarify, DVDs are probably more durable than an external. The external hard drive can go bad just from dropping it. Although it is to mentioned that a DVD can be cracked with the right kind of impact that may not be strong enough to actually damage the external, so it is a tradeoff, but I think the DVD would survive more common occurrences.
4. Frequency of the "hassle". - Since the hassle seems to be important based on your comments, I suggest that under normal circumstances, you should not have to restore files very often, so when you take all the advantages and cost savings of using DVDs, the hassle is far out-weighed.
I have not tried the DVD backup method for some time. However, the amount of swapping depends on a number of things. Restoring an image back to the same partition where no resizing is required is probably the easiest since TI can just place it back on the drive. If certain files are wanted or a partition resize is required, TI must get the data for each file as needed and the file may be scattered onto multiple discs. I suspect that having a defragged drive would help reduce the swapping requirements in these cases.
Since the imaging methods and restoring methods have changed (for the better) in the last several versions of TI compared to the older versions, this probably also makes a difference. The older versions did not try to restore things back to the original locations. This meant that the entire restore would be run more like a file restore and the swapping was reported to be terrible.
I will warn you, if you have to do a restore from the 4 or 5 DVDs you run the risk of driving yourself crazy inserting and reinserting the various DVDs. TI does not read all of one, then the next, etc. Joke is that you will wear out the drive's tray before you are done.
This is a gross exaggeration. This is how it works, and by the way, I have been backing up computers for 30 years now and this is basically the ONLY way it can work when you have files on multiple media.
...
Yes, I'm well aware of the need to read the metadata describing the backup off the last disk first. My reference to the excessive swaps is from reading many posts on this forum and the previous Wilder's Forum complaining about the swapping issue when restoring an image that spans more than 2 or 3 disks. So the comment comes directly from the experience of lots of other users and perhaps the latest versions are better.
Sure there are issues with external drives, especially if you don't treat them as they should be treated. However, over the years I've lost more information from unreadable optical media than I have from an external drive and I don't buy the cheap media. It is also worth remembering that if TI recreates one of its 4000 checksums/GB of archive incorrectly it will not restore the image. You can possibly extract files but not restore an image.
I used to store image backups of my PCs on DVD and store them at a neighbour's house for extra security. It got to the stage where the volume of DVDs got to be larger than the volume of a HD and it took lots of time to write and compare the DVDs and if you aren't doing either a TI Validate or your burner's "verify after burning" feature you are not secure right from creating the DVD. I now write my backup to a HD and store the bare HD at his house.
There is something to be said for diversity of media such that a common point of failure doesn't creep into the picture. An external drive does remove the disk controller as a single point of failure but I won't argue that a DVD does provide more diversity.
I always have more than one backup so if I drop a drive it is not likely to be an issue and if my house burned down and I was getting the HD from my neighbour it would likely be treated as if it were made of gold. I do not use and certainly don't advocate just one external drive; a bare minimum of 2 is required and 3 is better.
This is why I backup the way I do and everybody is free to do it anyway they see fit and think is better.