System Restore - Norton 'go Back' - Other

[bdenner]

My Sony Vaio uses the XP Professional operating system and now has two programs monitoring its operation to help me get out of strife in the event of a major crash:-

a. Norton ‘GO BACK’ --- I haven’t had to fall back on yet.

b. System Restore --- I have used in the past.

I know a lot of you guys rely on hardware like “Maxtor” etc. but I limit the amount of hardware I tote around with me only backing up data files to CD or flash memory. That heavy stuff is back at home in Perth!

There was a period where I had a wonky hard drive and no where near a service agent, my machine was going down every fortnight or so, I had to reboot in ‘Safe’ mode. While using ‘System Restore’ I found that the restoration was not always 100% complete and had to do a little “House Keeping” to bring my machine back to where it was, didn’t make much difference which restore backup I used. On some occasions I also had to use the ‘Files and Transfer Wizard’ where I regularly update and copy to CD the USMT2.UNC directory.

One might say it was the drive fault playing havoc on the restoration, I don’t know! All fixed now.

Just in passing:- I manually delete RPxxx folders more than 6 weeks old or >20 in number keeping disk usage down to reasonable levels. Of-coarse this option can be set automatically but I just like to have a quick look at what is being thrown out.

Have any of you guys used Norton ‘GO BACK’ or another package, if so what are your thoughts?

[JSixpack]

My Sony Vaio uses the XP Professional operating system and now has two programs monitoring its operation to help me get out of strife in the event of a major crash:-

a. Norton ‘GO BACK’ --- I haven’t had to fall back on yet.

b. System Restore --- I have used in the past.

I know a lot of you guys rely on hardware like “Maxtor” etc. but I limit the amount of hardware I tote around with me only backing up data files to CD or flash memory. That heavy stuff is back at home in Perth!

There was a period where I had a wonky hard drive and no where near a service agent, my machine was going down every fortnight or so, I had to reboot in ‘Safe’ mode. While using ‘System Restore’ I found that the restoration was not always 100% complete and had to do a little “House Keeping” to bring my machine back to where it was, didn’t make much difference which restore backup I used. On some occasions I also had to use the ‘Files and Transfer Wizard’ where I regularly update and copy to CD the USMT2.UNC directory.

One might say it was the drive fault playing havoc on the restoration, I don’t know! All fixed now.

Just in passing:- I manually delete RPxxx folders more than 6 weeks old or >20 in number keeping disk usage down to reasonable levels. Of-coarse this option can be set automatically but I just like to have a quick look at what is being thrown out.

Have any of you guys used Norton ‘GO BACK’ or another package, if so what are your thoughts?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I haven't used GO BACK as it seems like overkill to me and it would likely slow down the system. And one of the first things I do on a new XP system is to turn off System Restore. As you discovered it's not reliable. I love ERUNT, which will silently back up your registry on any schedule:

http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

It's highly likely w/ WinXP and an NTFS-formatted disk that ERUNT is all you'd ever need for routine OS repairs. But for a laptop, if I didn't have an external drive or network available, I'd make another partition for an image and, for (limited) disaster recovery, periodically image the active partition using a product like Acronis or Ghost. These can use CD-Rs and DVDs as well, but using CD-Rs is so slow and not so reliable anyway, that me, I'd probably not be able to force myself to do it. I mean, I'd wait until I had access to external media. You need several images or incremental images because the very last image might contain the very problem (e.g., virus) that trashed you, so you may need to go to an image further back. This may be a problem w/ GO BACK, but maybe you can GO BACK to previous backups--check on that. There are free imagers, which I haven't used, such as

DrvImagerXP

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Back-U...vImagerXP.shtml

Partition Saving

http://www.partition-saving.com/

And I'd run a backup program like SynchBack or just xcopy at XP startup (or shutdown, or whenever) to backup documents, favorites, etc. If I used Outlook Exp I'd run a free backup program for that. Actually the same partition will probably be good enough, because if your partition gets trashed, the chances are that your HD has failed.

When your HD suffers a hardware failure, as it inevitably will, no backup to the same disk is gonna do you any good of course.

Edited May 24, 2005 by JSixpack

[bdenner]

And one of the first things I do on a new XP system is to turn off System Restore. As you discovered it's not reliable.

Thanks for the advice - I turned off 'System Restore' a few days ago and just running 'Go Back' for piece of mind. A noticable improvment in performance with disk access reduced significantly. Will look at the other packages in due coarse, haven't had any problems for some time ("touch wood").

[Firefoxx]

For a major system restore, I simply ghost the boot partition to another partition beforehand (which is a major reason why I partition boot drives) and restore from the image when something happens. It's pretty drastic, but it's reliable and I only need to use it if it's a major restore. For anything else, I use conventional fixes.