Hi all, I have five related questions
I have a 250 gig three partitioned hardrive the c : drive is 10 gig and I have everything in the c drive
(1) how long do you think it would take to make an backup image of my c drive
I called a computer repair company and asked to come over and make a copy of my c drive on dvd for me at my home (its 100.00 an hour) and asked him how long it would take and he said 26 hours ? which of course is not do -able
He also stated that if I wanted to backup my hardrive
,(2) I should bring in my computer to the shop and the only way to make a copy of my hardrive was to remove the hardrive from the computer , I am hesitant to do this to my pc
( its a brand new $2,500 computer ) ,the reason he gave for doing this is because if he tried to make a backup copy with the software without removing the hardrive it would not copy those xp system files that were in use while making the backup , so it would be a poor copy and would not work as a restore to bring back my computer to the state it was in before a problem occured ,
(3) he also stated that norton ghost 9.0 is bad software and ghost 2003 has a better chance of working because it has to be dos ( floppy based) to have a chance of working so I must use 2003 instead of 9.0
and (4)also told me that ghost will not copy on to dvd only to a cd and thats a maybe , but he said the best chance for a successful copy would be to another partition on my hardrive (5) and then it would only be useful if I reformated the c drive
( erased the whole c drive) , he said you can't overwrite xp os and the c drive contents that was installed for example this month 2005 and then overwritten later in the future with a backup of the os on another partition that was incrementally backed up every month or so for a few years and then try to overwrite the 2005 c drive contents in 2007 with a 2007 backup of the c drive with its 2007 contents , it will only work that way if you do a clean format wipe out the c drive first .Then he says Norton ghost 9.0 is only for backing up personal data , well I have nero express basic software to do that.
So I said if norton ghost 9.0 is so bad , what would you recommend I do , he hemed and hawed and first he said something about a Maxtor one touch , so I said do you mean retrospect express software and he didnt seem to recognize the name and then he said veritas is good for backup of the whole c drive . but I dont think thats not a cloning backup thats the one thats just for personal data as far as I know ( I think xp uses that) ?
