DescentBB

OK, for a long time I ran FAT32 and I used a DOS xcopy command on my windows and program files directories and copied the contents to another HD. This system worked flawlessly and helped me survive many viruses.

However, I have finally (well maybe 1.5 yrs ago) gone to NTFS (friend convinced me it was a more efficient file system and that i'd have to defrag less often, which i never do anyway).

Unfortunately I don't know of any reliable backup method, as DOS won't work with an NTFS drive (sniff sniff). I have heard of Norton Ghost, but one of my friends had a bad experience where his backup didn't work and another who said it missed some important hidden windows files. Is there any program/method of restoring windows easily? I used to just change directory names in DOS, and in this situation I'm assuming I'll have to duplicate the files on another HD (I have a spare, identical size), and when I want to switch to the old state I'd have to change HD's. not a problem, I guess.

Any ideas?

...or does windows system restore point actually work? I've always been wary of any MS restoring, and I've heard if you get some virii it will attack restore points, destroying the whole point

A second hard drive and frequent file copies = good idea (good speed, too).

Never trust hard drives. Optical media is better, Magnito-Optical is the best but neither widely available or cheap.

I have 5 computers all running XP and NTFS, I made a batch file with the xcopy command to copy the MY_DOCS across the network on bootup, works flawlessly

Netgear actually has a new NAS (Network Attached Storage) device coming out. Basically it's a shell that you can put two IDE HDD's in. You could grab one of those (or, alternatively, scrape together an extra machine) and write a simple batch file that automatically copies over your sensitive data periodically.

The best solution, IMO, is to set up a domain controller and have all the PCs in your house connect to it. Then you can set their My Documents to a share on the server and have a centralized location from which to back up. If you use Linux/Samba, it's trivial to set up a cron job to automatically burn CDs every night/week/whenever.

I use Powerquest Drive Image 7.0 once a week to pull images of my disks and put them on USB drives/CD-R.

Editt: Oh, they got bought by Norton Ghost 9.0 seems to be the equivalent..

if you're copying all your stuff to another HD anyway, you could use a raid setup with 2 mirrored HDs and spare the work each time. many boards have raid controllers onboard nowadays.
chances that both HDs blow up at the same time are next to zero.

how can you possibly do xcopy with an NTFS drive? DOS won't access NTFS

I understand how to just drag files onto a HD, but if you just drag the contents of the windows drive, if I recall correctly, even if you have hidden files shown, it won't copy all the important OS files. Or am I wrong?

It will copy all hidden and system files if you have the proper options selected in the Folder Options window.

xcopy will work from a DOS window (cmd.exe), because DOS windows go through Windows to access drives. That's how you can access logical drives, mapped network shares, etc. from a DOS window. As far as booting from a DOS floppy/Win9x CD, then no you can't do an xcopy because that version of DOS only understands FAT.

There isn't a single trace of DOS in WinNT/2000/XP, they just mimetized the interface (black window) with prompt and commands. Batch commands are supported as well as piping. On a WinNT machine xcopy is actually a command-line Win32 application like any other, and will happily copy files from/to any drive available in your system, including flashsticks, network drives and this regardless of what filesystem they use.

I'm somewhat paranoid about backing stuff up. I've lost gigs of data from bad drives, and I refuse to get caught again.

I'm currently backing up to two separate drives (mirrored) AND a tape drive. And once a month I dump everything onto a file server for good measure.

God I hate dead hard drives. At one point I had a stack of about 30 of them, and I was going to have everyone over for a drive-shotput contest. I wound up just throwing them.

Hard drives are very sturdy. Took me about 20 hits with a 10-lb sledge to crack one in half.

Filling them with sand and aluminum foil and powering them on was fun too (using an old AT power supply).

Jeez, I have no life.