Free Backup/Recovery, VM and more

bpgreen

15 years ago

Paragon Software has a number of programs that are available free for personal use.

One is a backup/restore program that images a drive and also allows for incremental backups.

You can also create a VM of one PC to run in another.

Free stuff

Backup

VM

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Comments (5)

ravencajun Zone 8b TX
15 years ago
another imaging program that is free that I found out about recently is this one
EASEUS Todo Backup
jane__ny
15 years ago
I don't understand what these products are. Could they be helpful with my situation?

Jane
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what acronis does is different than just doing a back up of files, acronis takes a snap shot of your entire hard drive including the operating system so it is an image, then should you need to restore from it you would be restoring every single thing including the operating system. In doing just data and file backups should you need to do a full reformat then you would need to have either a copy of your operating system cd to re-install your OS or the recovery cd, and then you could use your file and data backups to put those back in place once you had re-installed your OS and done all the many updates for it, which can be a long and tedious procedure. So it is a better way to backup when using an image you can be back up and running in very short order at the exact point in time that you did your last image save. You could certainly leave the data you have saved on the external hard drive and just make a new folder to put your acronis images into you seem to have plenty of room available. Usually the acronis version that comes with a branded drive may be a bit different than the stand alone version of acronis you can buy but I would think it would be just fine. there are some very good tutorials available on how to use acronis if you need those just ask or google for it. In my opinion an image backup is the best way to go.
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System Restore is usually from your "C:\System Volume Information" a hidden folder by default. Sounds like your D has the OEM install files on it.. to revert your computer hard drive back to Out of the Box new condition. If you didn't delete any of it :) .... An image of your C drive made by a program like Macrium will usually compress to about half the total used bytes that that drive shows as currently used in windows. Usually too big to image to DVD's unless you don't mind spending the time it would take to do,,, and of course the cost of several DVD's. My C drive is small compared to most peoples on win7 and shows 60gb used .. divided by about 4.7gb per DVD.. thats a lot of DVD's and lots of time sitting there changing those disks. fwiw Paid about $11 delivered from newegg for a usb hard drive enclosure and stuck an old laptop hard drive in it & use that here to save system images to weekly. Think DVD-R's cost me about $0.40 each in a pack of 50 including tax from Office Depot.
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ZL, I was responding to Smallen's post where he was going to do all the work himself except the hot gas connection. Each install I've seen, the tech forces the gas into the house side of the loop, closes the service valves, and does the tubing work, evacuating just the condenser then topping off if necessary. Alphonse, there is no problem doing the hot gas work first. The systems 'run dry' without damage...just don't connect the power to the circulating pump until you connect the water. I like to add a switch to the pump circuit to make it easy to service and to see the difference with & without the hru online. I'm ok with your criticisms, Chris. I have never seen water come out of the aquifer at 77 degrees in Florida. Even the open springs run no hotter than 72 and that's year round (right now Blue Spring, near Orange City has a huge mass of Manatees keeping warm in it). I set the hot water heater at 110 degrees so never need to touch the controls and it rarely switches on in the summer. Remember here in cent FL, A/C gets used a good 9 months of the year and even in heat pump mode you'll get some hot water. With an 80 gallon tank, I've never run out of hot water and don't think a storage tank is a necessary expense. Solar installs need a larger storage as they can't heat water at night or early morning when most use takes place. My $50 figure comes from my experience and the observation that most sources agree that water heating costs $30-40 a month and watching my A/C compressor lose 2-4 amps of draw when the HUR is operating leads me to expect another $10-20 a month saving there.
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bpgreen
Original Author
15 years ago
Two of these products make exact copies of a drive (called an image). They're generally used to do a full backup so that if you have a big problem (hard drive crash, data loss due to unforeseen circumstances, etc) you can just copy it back and be up and running, with no need to reinstall your OS, all the drivers and updates, all your programs, then all your data. You just put the new drive in, boot with a recovery CD (or DVD) and run the restore process. There are usually a few options for you, especially if you are going from a smaller drive to a larger one (you can usually let the program resize the partition(s) automatically, for example).

The one Ravencajun linked lets you treat the image as if it were a hard drive, so you could access individual files on it using Windows explorer. I haven't used it, so I can't verify that, but that's what the description says (that's what they mean when they say mount the image files as virtual drives). The Paragon software lets you restore individual files and folders, but it restores them to the same location where they were before.

The VM link I provided lets you make a copy of your drive as a virtual machine. Windows 7 professional has Virtual machine support built in (none of the home versions do). VMWare has a free player for VMWare virtual machines.

So let's say you're upgrading to a new machine but still want to use some programs on your old machine. You could download the vmware player and install it on the new machine. Then create a virtual machine of the old PC and run it in the new PC. Note that it's running as if it is a separate machine, so you need virus protection for it even if the new machine has its own virus protection.

I'm dong something like that now with a work computer because one client has software that won't run on Windows 7 but is required to access their network. So I installed an XP virtual machine and installed their software in the XP virtual machine. As a side benefit, I had a scanner that wasn't playing well with Windows 7, but it works fine in the XP VM.
ravencajun Zone 8b TX
15 years ago
Jane had you used one of these imaging programs on your pc before you made the big boo boo you could have easily used the drive image to simply restore your entire pc to the state it was when you created the image, including windows and all programs etc, it takes a picture of the drive basically. But in your current state no since you do not have an image to use to restore from it would not help.

however I would sure use one from now on to image all of your hard drives so should you ever have another opps moment you can easily recover.

Windows 7 has a type of imaging feature built in.
jane__ny
15 years ago
Thanks for the explanation. Yes, too late for this one, but would like to use that for my other office computer. Thank goodness, I didn't fool with that.

Hard getting my mind around all this stuff.

Jane

Free Backup/Recovery, VM and more

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ravencajun Zone 8b TX

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bpgreen
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Free Backup/Recovery, VM and more

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ravencajun Zone 8b TX

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bpgreenOriginal Author

ravencajun Zone 8b TX

jane__ny

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