Netbooks and OS backup/restore methods

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cyril7

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#74201 27-Dec-2010 10:49

Hi, Santa brought me a Netbook, the basic emachine m350, which is bottom of the heap but I am well pleased with it for the $ and the functionality it provides me with.

However (and forgive me if its covered in another thread) but how are you meant to backup the OS in the event of a future meltdown. With a normal notebook or PC you create a DVD with the OS image and drivers, and the M350 comes with the tools to do this, but expects a DVD drive which naturally does not exist.

So what do others do, buy a USB DVD an added cost I dont really want or is there a tool to create a bootable flash stick, or do you just haul the disc out and put it in another machine and create/restore the image.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Cyril

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#423864 4-Jan-2011 02:58

I use an external harddisk, connected via USB2.0 (always available) or eSATA (faster), for my backups. It's the cheapest way.

1TB is about 100NZD. That's about 220 DVDs.

I usually boot Linux from a USB stick (e.g. Puppy Linux), and then do a "dd" to clone the notebook disk to my external disk (example: dd if=/dev/sda of=~/disk1.img). See here for a tutorial: http://www.backuphowto.info/linux-backup-hard-disk-clone-dd

sbiddle

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#423873 4-Jan-2011 07:15

I use Acronis True Image for all my backups and back these up to my server which in turn is backed up to portable HDD's. With something like Acronis you can simply boot the rscue disk from a USB drive to recover.

Ragnor

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#424374 5-Jan-2011 18:30

Yep regular image of the disk, which is saved to external USB drive is the easiest way.

Acronis True Image is good but costs money.

Free alternatives are: Macrium Reflect Free or Paragon Backup and Restore Free Advanced, these don't have the full feature set of the paid version but can be good enough imo.

cyril7

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#425110 8-Jan-2011 08:37

Cheers Ragnor, will check out the two freebee's, basic factory image backup so I can restore in event of disc failure is all I am after.

Cheers
Cyril