Originally Posted by
- JO -
Thanks ! That’s a very good idea ! Does backup softwares have the same result ?
When I'll find more or less the configuration that I had, I consider using one of those special software... (As I've learned the hard way that the « backup » of windows is not a mirror image)
Backup software ? Probably ! I have never used backup software. I think that XCopy does a super job. You can set it to go through the directory tree looking at filesize & timestamp differences and copy over newer files and those files that dont exist. So if you keep all of your own work under one directory point then its a one line job to back it up which I make a little BAT file out of and then run that. Normally I might have a few more lines in that so cover some other important dirs too but its not huge. I have a temporary dir as well which I exclude from the backup.
You cant snapshot windows wholesale to make a backup. You can do a system snapshot and then your able to do a system restore later on if you have the snapshot file to hand. So this is used when you update drivers and other stuff which is very OS dependent. When you have trouble booting because its gone bad often you can go into safe mode and from there you can do a system restore to the last snapshot you made. Thats used when the OS is corrupted in some manner rather than losing your hard drive and data files. So its a good idea to make a snapshot when a) your system is working real well and b) when its ok and your just about to upgrade an important driver like the display driver.
If things go really pear shaped (bad) then I am usually happy to nuke the OS from orbit so long as I have all my data backed up. I am more concerned with all my work than windows files. Having the backup on an external HDD is always a good idea too. I made the mistake of having twin internal HDDs and backing up from one to the other. Fine until my power supply when boom and took out the whole machine and everything in it.
Make up a little BAT file and put in something like this:
Code:
xcopy E:\*.* U:\E_Drive /K /O /X /E /Y /D /C /R /F /H /EXCLUDE:xcopy_exclude_list.txt
where E:\ is your data drive which could also have been C:\MyData or whatever and U:\ is the USB drive.
xcopy_exclude_list.txt would be a plain text file in the same dir as the bat file something like:
Code:
E:\Temp
E:\MassiveUnusedDataStore
E:\AnotherUselessDir
xcopy used to be a standard command from the command line. Microsoft have a habit of deprecating these useful commands. But then, I have deprecated windows !