Win7 Backup Image Utility

[Paul]

And that defragmenter would be ???????

Raxco PerfectDisk. I used the eval version as my "helper"
to shrink C:. Just for the fun of it. Because Microsoft
couldn't figure out how to move those metadata files. It
takes multiple passes of PerfectDisk, Shrink, PerfectDisk,
Shrink, ... to get to the desired size (320GB to 40GB).

Paul

 

[Ken Springer]

Raxco PerfectDisk. I used the eval version as my "helper"
to shrink C:. Just for the fun of it. Because Microsoft
couldn't figure out how to move those metadata files. It
takes multiple passes of PerfectDisk, Shrink, PerfectDisk,
Shrink, ... to get to the desired size (320GB to 40GB).

Paul

Thanks, Paul.

--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.6.8
Firefox 17.0
Thunderbird 17.0
LibreOffice 3.6.3.2

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

Yup. The last time I upgraded ATI, the first thing I did was to
make a backup with the old version, make sure I had two recovery
CDs, install the new version, backup with _it_, and then restore
with it. Then I knew I had confidence in the new version. If the
restore had failed, I would not have had confidence, but I could
still restore with the old backup, losing nothing. Note: I don't
make every suggested upgrade with a program that vital; I need
a good reason.

When you restore with no option to back out, you end up with one
of two things: a restored system, or a really underweight boat
anchor.

I guess that means I better buy a boat one of these days.

There is the possibility of testing the operation on an unused hard
drive and seeing if it boots OK. And I usually do a clone backup at the
same time as I do the image backup, so that qualifies as belt +
suspenders...both of which can, of course, fail

 

[Robin Bignall]

Thanks, Paul.

Yeah, I have Perfect Disk Pro, which recognises SSDs and doesn't
normally defrag them, but you can override that.

 

[Justin]

I make backup inages via the tool that comes with Windows 7. My drive is 500GB
(with 40GB currently on it) and the drive I put the image to is 60GB.
Obviously each time I backup a new image to it the previous one is gone. But
now for a destination drive I use a 320GB. The way I figure it I should get at
LEAST 5 images on it but Windows keeps deleteing the previous one.

If I split the destination drive into 5 partitions (320/5) and each time I
back up use a different partition will those images have a good integrity for
restore if needed? I would hate to have a false sense of security.

TIA, Dennis
==================

Try CloneZilla.

 

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

Note "the tool that comes with Windows 7". He uses that, presumably
because he wants to.

(That is irritating; is that just the default, and can be overridden [if
so, how, somebody?], or unchangeable?)
Sounds a good plan, but I'd make sure as you say!

Try CloneZilla.

Which doesn't answer his question(s).

 

[charlie]

I guess that means I better buy a boat one of these days.

There is the possibility of testing the operation on an unused hard
drive and seeing if it boots OK. And I usually do a clone backup at the
same time as I do the image backup, so that qualifies as belt +
suspenders...both of which can, of course, fail

After screwing around into the wee hours this morning.
An additional gotcha reared it's ugly head!
The backup drive I will be using is a Seagate "GoFlex" desk that is a
3Tb drive, and the PC I'm currently fooling with has only USB2(Slow)
Anyway, Win7 backup has problems with drives around 2 TB or larger,
so shrinking the original or not, another backup method/program
will need to be used. Seagate included a limited copy of Acronis on the
drive that seems to work. Unfortunately, it has limitations that impact
what I want to do.
It gets worse! The Seagate included version supposedly is licensed for 3
PCs, and the "upgrade" to full is for only one. In addition, some of the
needed capabilities have been split out, requiring separate purchase.
(Bummer!)

The process of getting SSD drives (of admittedly smaller capacity than
the original boot HDs) installed and working as a boot drive on existing
PCs is getting to be a major time sink, and it really should not be!

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

After screwing around into the wee hours this morning.
An additional gotcha reared it's ugly head!
The backup drive I will be using is a Seagate "GoFlex" desk that is a
3Tb drive, and the PC I'm currently fooling with has only USB2(Slow)
Anyway, Win7 backup has problems with drives around 2 TB or larger,
so shrinking the original or not, another backup method/program
will need to be used. Seagate included a limited copy of Acronis on the
drive that seems to work. Unfortunately, it has limitations that impact
what I want to do.
It gets worse! The Seagate included version supposedly is licensed for 3
PCs, and the "upgrade" to full is for only one. In addition, some of the
needed capabilities have been split out, requiring separate purchase.
(Bummer!)

The process of getting SSD drives (of admittedly smaller capacity than
the original boot HDs) installed and working as a boot drive on existing
PCs is getting to be a major time sink, and it really should not be!

On the issue of backup programs, you might find EaseUS Todo suitable,
and it has a free version with most of the capabilities. I've only used
the free version.

Thinking later on another topic somewhere in this thread, I am pretty
sure that the cloning process in both EaseUS and Macrium will clone a
hard drive to a smaller drive, as long as it's big enough to hold the
active data. That means it will work to restore or transfer a backup to
a smaller drive, since cloning works both ways, unlike imaging.

 

[Paul]

After screwing around into the wee hours this morning.
An additional gotcha reared it's ugly head!
The backup drive I will be using is a Seagate "GoFlex" desk that is a
3Tb drive, and the PC I'm currently fooling with has only USB2(Slow)
Anyway, Win7 backup has problems with drives around 2 TB or larger,
so shrinking the original or not, another backup method/program
will need to be used. Seagate included a limited copy of Acronis on the
drive that seems to work. Unfortunately, it has limitations that impact
what I want to do.
It gets worse! The Seagate included version supposedly is licensed for 3
PCs, and the "upgrade" to full is for only one. In addition, some of the
needed capabilities have been split out, requiring separate purchase.
(Bummer!)

The process of getting SSD drives (of admittedly smaller capacity than
the original boot HDs) installed and working as a boot drive on existing
PCs is getting to be a major time sink, and it really should not be!

What if you use GPT partitioning on the USB 3TB ? Does that work ?
Or is that why you need a different version of Acronis ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

Paul

 

[charlie]

What if you use GPT partitioning on the USB 3TB ? Does that work ?
Or is that why you need a different version of Acronis ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

Paul

From what I can see, the built in win7 backup/recovery software has a
problem with the Seagate 3TB external CD. It times out during the
backup, with a commonly experienced error that chases back to large HDs
above 2.2TB. I tried the Seagate "DiskWizard" (A limited 2011? version
of True Acronis). It sort of tried to work, but the destination SSD
came up with the classic no bootmgr error, ans did the "boot CD"
made with the same software.
I did manage to shrink the contents of the original HD to where it
should fit on the SSD. I may try to shrink it further before I try
again. The current internal HDs are NTFS. I'll have to look at the
external 3TB to see what its details really are.
Charlie

 

[Paul]

From what I can see, the built in win7 backup/recovery software has a
problem with the Seagate 3TB external CD. It times out during the
backup, with a commonly experienced error that chases back to large HDs
above 2.2TB. I tried the Seagate "DiskWizard" (A limited 2011? version
of True Acronis). It sort of tried to work, but the destination SSD
came up with the classic no bootmgr error, ans did the "boot CD"
made with the same software.
I did manage to shrink the contents of the original HD to where it
should fit on the SSD. I may try to shrink it further before I try
again. The current internal HDs are NTFS. I'll have to look at the
external 3TB to see what its details really are.
Charlie

The Discwizard manual appears here.

http://www.seagate.com/files/www-co...ds/discwizard/_shared/docs/dw_ug.en.14382.pdf

GPT appears in the manual many times - most of them, irrelevant to your
situation. But if you read the whole manual, maybe you can find an
example that applies. Windows 7 should have some GPT support, so
at least half of what you're trying to do, should work.

Paul

 

[Paul]

From what I can see, the built in win7 backup/recovery software has a
problem with the Seagate 3TB external CD. It times out during the
backup, with a commonly experienced error that chases back to large HDs
above 2.2TB. I tried the Seagate "DiskWizard" (A limited 2011? version
of True Acronis). It sort of tried to work, but the destination SSD
came up with the classic no bootmgr error, ans did the "boot CD"
made with the same software.
I did manage to shrink the contents of the original HD to where it
should fit on the SSD. I may try to shrink it further before I try
again. The current internal HDs are NTFS. I'll have to look at the
external 3TB to see what its details really are.
Charlie

There is also this Adobe Flash page. Click "Next" at the bottom,
when the page is rendered in Flash.

"Interactive Guide for Understanding and Surpassing the 2.2 TB Limitation"

http://support.seagate.com/kbimg/flash/218691/218691_EN.swf

The little bit I viewed, didn't strike me as *that* interactive.
More of a nuisance really.

Paul

 

[charlie]

On the issue of backup programs, you might find EaseUS Todo suitable,
and it has a free version with most of the capabilities. I've only used
the free version.

Thinking later on another topic somewhere in this thread, I am pretty
sure that the cloning process in both EaseUS and Macrium will clone a
hard drive to a smaller drive, as long as it's big enough to hold the
active data. That means it will work to restore or transfer a backup to
a smaller drive, since cloning works both ways, unlike imaging.

The problems were solved, although I'm slightly? hazy as to the whys and
wherefores.

Little annoying problems kept cropping up, such as no bootmgr errors.
can't read track16, etc., with the Seagate/Acronis utility. This
resulted in several different attempts to restore, with various "gotchas".

I finally gave up on getting the image to restore from the 3Tb drive, so
I moved(copied) it to a 500G HD I happened to have inside an external
adapter for Sata 2.5 drives to USB.
Since USB 2.0 is rather slow, compared to SATA 3, I used the bare drive
and internal SATA ports.
The MBD is a somewhat older ASUS M4A79 board with a Phenom II x4 and 4G
of DMM2 memory, with 4+2 SATA 3 ports from the AMD SB750 chip.
The BIOS was updated to rev 3702 (last version) in 2010.
The only continuing problem I've had with this board's BIOS reared it's
head again during the process. The boot order options never did exactly
work properly. This forced me to do a which SATA port is in what boot
order, and forget about trying to change the order in BIOS.

I was able to shrink the original C: (boot drive) image down to a size
that easily fit the 240G SSD. (Move stuff, shrink, etc.) Getting an
image via the Seagate/Acronis utility wasn't a problem. Placing the
image on the SSD turned out to be THE problem. When all was said and
done, the hidden 100Mb "System" partition on the original HD is not
present on the SSD, although the contents are all there. The
Seagate/Acronis CD that I made using the utility was supposedly
bootable, but turned out not to have everything needed to boot properly.
This forced use of a win7 repair/recovery DVD to boot,
then start the disk utility from the Seagate/Acronis CD.
Finally, the page file was moved from the SSD after the SSD was up and
running as the boot drive.
SHEESH!

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

The problems were solved, although I'm slightly? hazy as to the whys and
wherefores.

Little annoying problems kept cropping up, such as no bootmgr errors.
can't read track16, etc., with the Seagate/Acronis utility. This
resulted in several different attempts to restore, with various "gotchas".

I finally gave up on getting the image to restore from the 3Tb drive, so
I moved(copied) it to a 500G HD I happened to have inside an external
adapter for Sata 2.5 drives to USB.
Since USB 2.0 is rather slow, compared to SATA 3, I used the bare drive
and internal SATA ports.
The MBD is a somewhat older ASUS M4A79 board with a Phenom II x4 and 4G
of DMM2 memory, with 4+2 SATA 3 ports from the AMD SB750 chip.
The BIOS was updated to rev 3702 (last version) in 2010.
The only continuing problem I've had with this board's BIOS reared it's
head again during the process. The boot order options never did exactly
work properly. This forced me to do a which SATA port is in what boot
order, and forget about trying to change the order in BIOS.

I was able to shrink the original C: (boot drive) image down to a size
that easily fit the 240G SSD. (Move stuff, shrink, etc.) Getting an
image via the Seagate/Acronis utility wasn't a problem. Placing the
image on the SSD turned out to be THE problem. When all was said and
done, the hidden 100Mb "System" partition on the original HD is not
present on the SSD, although the contents are all there. The
Seagate/Acronis CD that I made using the utility was supposedly
bootable, but turned out not to have everything needed to boot properly.
This forced use of a win7 repair/recovery DVD to boot,
then start the disk utility from the Seagate/Acronis CD.
Finally, the page file was moved from the SSD after the SSD was up and
running as the boot drive.
SHEESH!

Also WHEEEW!

Persistence pays