Backup/clone/hdd help! URGENT OMFG

[Drolgin Steingrinder]

Hey guys and gals,

Situation:
My laptop has a hdd problem, bad sectors and intermittent BSODs. Dell is shipping me a replacement harddrive but are doing a straight swap where I basically have to hand over the old drive as soon as I get the new one - so I can't just clone from one to the other.

I've tried using Acronis True Image Home (both image builder and cloning), built-in Windows (7) backup and R-Drive Image with no luck. Acronis crashes, Windows gives me an I/O error and R-Drive claims broken sectors (which I believe).

How can I backup my existing partitions to an external drive so I don't have to reinstall everything again? And will the (physical) bad sectors on the drive being cloned from cause problems in the new drive? When I installed Windows last time it took me weeks to get drivers working again and I really badly need this machine to work - and can't afford buying a new one.

Help! Please!

[Bubba Grizz]

Can you slave it using an enclosure? Coincidentally I have a work laptop drive that I need to do that to today. I then run a chkdsk using a command prompt on that drive. (chkdsk E: /r) This scan could take a while. If nothing else you should be able to move some data off of there. Granted if you don't have another machine to move it to that could be a problem.

[Aslanna]

Can give Macrium Reflect a try. I used it before and it did the job. And it's free! But yeah you might need to do a chkdsk first.

[Drolgin Steingrinder]

I've been able to copy most of my data but given up on the whole image thing, tried running a linux live cd and using dd to image it to my external harddrive, but it crashed after just 8gb. I think the physical errors on the disk are just too much for it to handle :/ (and yeah, I ran chkdsk and it claimed it'd fixed the bad sectors but it hadn't, the bastard!)

[Aabidano]

Ack, just looked, hadn't run a home backup since last Mar. It's running now

[Winnow]

I learned my lesson. I backup my OS partition at least once a month and back up (sync so doesn't take long) key folder structures of data at least monthly as well.

Tip: every few full partition backups you make, verify the actual backup. Sometimes those are corrupt which won't do you much good. Acronis also nice for quickly mounting those old partition images if you need to access old data trapped in time. (emails, contacts, links, etc or whatever)

[Aslanna]

Speaking of Acronis I think they also have a free version if you use a Western Digital drive. Which is all I buy these days. A lot of free solutions out there yet I'm guessing a majority of the people don't bother.

[Aabidano]

Love Acronis, I even pay for it.

[Kilmoll the Sexy]

run it with chkdsk /r /f I have had a drive fail yet after running it with both switches. Even if you repair bad sectors, sometimes the hosed up file structures interfere with the cloning. FWIW, I use Acronis 9 and it runs even with drives encrypted with Pointsec.

[Animalor]

I have an account with carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com). Sweet online backup service. I've quite please with it. Essentially set it and forget it.

[Winnow]

I have an account with carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com). Sweet online backup service. I've quite please with it. Essentially set it and forget it.

That's for smaller amounts of files though. No way do I use that for the size of my file backups and not for OS partition images.

I don't like the stipulations:

* Online/offsite file storage. Carbonite is NOT a place to move files from your hard drive, to free up space on your hard drive. If you remove any file from your hard drive, we wait 30 days for you to recover it, and then we delete that file from our servers, too.

* Program or system backup. Carbonite backs up the irreplaceable files on your computer – user-generated content such as photos, documents, music, etc. We do not back up software programs, temporary files or system files. Learn exactly what we do and don’t back up.

* External Hard Drive backup. Our Carbonite consumer product does not allow you to back up your external hard drive. However, we do offer external hard drive support with our small business product.

* Archiving. We do not keep every version of every file you’ve ever created. Our PC product offers versioning, which allows you to recover some versions of your files, going back up to 90 days.

[Aslanna]

Yeah online backup isn't really suited for system backups as such. Meaning if your system failed could you use them to rebuild a new drive? Doubtful. And $55 a year? Robbery! I'd rather use local software to create local backups. They are just as easy to "set it and forget it".

[Aabidano]

My network drive is full

[Animalor]

Re Carbonite - For the random files on my PC it's a great backup. Pictures, music, video I specifically stupilate I want backed up to the service.
I also have my PSP games that I bought off the PSN backed up there.

I don't dick around with my systems that it's worthwhile keeping a full system image and I do enjoy the yearly rebuild just to get things fresh and the cleaning out of the cruft. Although now that I think of it, with Windows 7, I haven't even felt the need to do even that. The system runs as well now as it did when I first installed it.

Carbonite's been a good solution for me as far as an offsite backup solution goes.

(oh, and I don't hoard tb's worth of copyrighted materials either =P )

[miir]

I also have my PSP games that I bought off the PSN backed up there.

Not necessary.
You can re-download from PSN as many times as you like.

[Ashur]

Speaking of Acronis I think they also have a free version if you use a Western Digital drive.

Any details on that?

[Aslanna]

http://support.wdc.com/product/download ... p?swid=119

No recommendation though as I don't use it. Thinking about it though since on my new machine I am not running any backups so that would be better than nothing.

[Ashur]

Thank you.

[pyrella]

In regards to online backup - I've been using Mozy for just about a year now. Pretty much same as above, but I don't know of any limitations as far as what you're allowed to backup. I've got a few hundred gig up there now,system images for vmware, pictures, docs, music, some movies, etc.

The advantage to this over a local backup is if the house burns down your covered, and you aren't relying on another single point of failure running to another disk. The online places usually have large amounts of redundancy

Up until 2GB of data it is free - so if you're just worried about some important docs/settings files/etc can always just use the free service.

[Animalor]

I also have my PSP games that I bought off the PSN backed up there.

Not necessary.
You can re-download from PSN as many times as you like.

Very true. It wasn't my plan to back it up. I installed the software and a few days later when it was done, I had noticed that it had sucked em up too. I'm not complaining mind you.

[Winnow]

In regards to online backup - I've been using Mozy for just about a year now. Pretty much same as above, but I don't know of any limitations as far as what you're allowed to backup. I've got a few hundred gig up there now,system images for vmware, pictures, docs, music, some movies, etc.

The advantage to this over a local backup is if the house burns down your covered, and you aren't relying on another single point of failure running to another disk. The online places usually have large amounts of redundancy

Up until 2GB of data it is free - so if you're just worried about some important docs/settings files/etc can always just use the free service.

Looks interesting. I searched all over the Mozy website but couldn't find storage limits listed. If you've got several hundred GB up there that's pretty good. Can you access Mozy like a file server, accessing folders etc?

[pyrella]

It will install a Mozy Home Folder that you can see in your file explorer. If you want to use the versioning (it backs up twice a day and keeps it for a month, so up to 60 versions of a file) you will need to open up there client piece to get anything but the latest file.

One thing that is the same as the other, it's not a remote hard drive - if you delete a file, after 30 days it will be gone.

Another downside is large amounts of data will take a while to restore as they do deduplication and it takes time to 'rehydrate' the data. Nothing terrible, but anyone with a 10m or faster line will see they aren't coming close to maxing it out.

Again this is for disaster recovery, not augmenting existing storage with 'cloud storage'.

On that note, been looking at a few cloud storage solutions for work, and will pass those on here shortly. None seem to be good for the enterprise since we already have our own storage systems at a data center (i.e.....THE CLOUD OF DOOM), but seem pretty nice for the home environment.

[Xouqoa]

I use Dropbox + Backblaze for my documents/photos/music/videos.

If anybody wants to check out Dropbox, let me know and I'll send you a referral link!

[pyrella]

Hook me up moocow -

I retract my endorsement of mozy. All new accounts, and existing accounts starting next month see a dollar increase for service up to 50GB, double for up to 125, and 2 bucks per 10 gig i believe after that.

Someone recommended idrive.com - but I'll check out xou's too.