The end is Nigh for your Data

Through my own stupidity I broke something in Windows the other day. Rather than mess about I decided to restore a Ghost image I'd made a couple of days previously (all my data is on another partition, and backed up on CDR and another PC). I timed it, it took precisely 7 minutes to have a fully working restored Windows XP again, and that was including the optional Ghost integrity check.

Apart from the hours necessary to make an unattended install CD, it surely will take several hours to restore Windows, drivers and apps that way? I can see how it would benefit a rollout to many PC's (which is what MS intended), I'm sorry but I can't see a single benefit to unattended install over imaging software for a single PC (or even 2 or 3 come to that).

While there are indeed benefits to using unattended install procedures in other cases, as a substitute for a backup (particularly and image backup) I have to side with Sparks. An image works out quicker all the way around.

The thing we need to take into account is that for an unattended install, the building process is a one time only event, and updating it is a breeze, new service packs, drivers or any software upgrades are easily integrated into the install source with very little effort. Every time you deploy this installation the system will be perfectly clean (or as you intended) every time.

As to restore times, takes my system about 30 to 40 minutes depending on what i tell it to install for me (automated, based on MAC address), either way, just a few clicks and i can relax while the PC takes care of the rest for me.

Not going to knock down Ghost and go on about the negative sides of it, you're all probably well aware of it's requirments/limitations... Ghost was one of my favourite programs not so long ago, you probably all remember that too, all those posts where I'd praise Ghost for the wonderful things i achieved with it, so i give it credit for that, i used it for years and it's never let me down... but both unattended installations and disk imaging have their place in this world, and for the reasons I've mentioned, that's why unattended suits me better for my needs. I know the ropes with Ghost, been there done that, got fed up with its limitations etc, my point is just to make people aware of other methods i now use, Ghosting isn't the only way to deploy an OS, and Ghost isn't necessarily the best option when it comes to long term, or dealing with several systems!

Regards :)

I have found that in all utility programs and applications that a combination of parts and wholes work best for me. That's why I look at alot of ways to do things paying attention to time, ease, and results of execution. Also on important job tasks is the mechanics of operation involved with whatever job task you are doing.

Fortunately, there is available more than one application per job task and that is not bad as we all see that same thing differently in many cases. We can get to pick what works best for us individually.

But what is more important we have a forum to put forth our views and can discuss them and when you get a thread going like this you have a chance to learn alot from other peoples experiences. :)

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But what is more important we have a forum to put forth our views and can discuss them and when you get a thread going like this you have a chance to learn alot from other peoples experiences.

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Amen brother!!!

It has taken me around 20 minutes to go back and forth on all the links on just this page, not to mention the 10 others I've saved from the threads mentioned. I'm soaking up so much info that my head is about to burst! :)

I thank all of you kindly and greatly!

And welcome to VirDr dlymor. Enjoy. :)

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Originally posted by SuperSparks
I'm sorry but I can't see a single benefit to unattended install over imaging software for a single PC (or even 2 or 3 come to that).

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I have mentioned many benefits of unattended, but I'm curious to ask you, is there some particular limitation of doing an unattended install that prevents it from being useful to you, or replacing the Ghosting of your system partition?

I realise it's not suitable for everyone, so thought I'd ask...

Regards :)

Particular limitation? For me it's a complete waste of time. As I said, I can be up and running in 7 minutes with Ghost, and just carry on from where I left off. And all it costs me is a few minutes to make a new image now and again and a bit of cheap hard drive space (of which I have plenty).

And let me ask a question here. Are you seriously telling me that I can have Windows XP, Visual Studio .NET with the full MSDN library (a 2 hour, 7 CD install on it's own), Office 2003 Pro, Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop CS, Virtual PC and all of my many lesser apps, complete with all my personalisations of them in 30 minutes?

I have not timed one yet as have not made an unattended install yet so someone else will have to answer that.

Certainly time is a factor in all we do. But does time matter on an unattended install if you are not there? Something to ponder. Interesting. :)

It matters to me in the sense that I want to use the computer, and not be sitting around waiting, even if it does do the work (though admittedly in my case I do have another PC). I still don't know how it gets around the 7 Visual Studio CD's, for example, either, surely they still have to be fed in manually. And I really would like to know if the unattended install also allows me to set up my apps how I want them? Because to me that is often the most time consuming business of all.

Well said GG1, that's the spirit :)

Also, how often does one need to restore their system drive anyway? for me it's quite rare these days so i don't need gigs of ghost images sitting around if i only use them a few times a year, by which time the software contained in them is often in need of upgrade anyway, leading to creation of a new image, and so on, multiplied by however many OS's one uses.

The time it takes to restore for me is not so important (within reason of-course), i can easily find something else to do for 40 mins or so.

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Originally posted by SuperSparks
And let me ask a question here. Are you seriously telling me that I can have Windows XP, Visual Studio .NET with the full sMSDN library (a 2 hour, 7 CD install on it's own), Office 2003 Pro, Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop CS, Virtual PC and all of my many lesser apps, complete with all my personalisations of them in 30 minutes?

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All the software you mentioned there, including XP, but with the exception of "Visual Studio .NET" could probably all be installed in about 40 minutes or so on a fast PC, not much more... I have quite a lot of software on my main system, most small, but some large installs too, all the essentials all installed (and configured and registered where applicable) automatically. On this 'main' box I'm left with a handful programs to manually install, but nothing worth Ghosting for. My other PC's don't require so much software, so installations are 100% unattended.

Besides, there's nothing to stop you from using both if you have that much software, games or a particular software that would be difficult or time consuming to silently install...

Take for example, how does a Ghost user do a clean install of a Service Pack? answer, they don't, at-least not without having to dump everything and start again? Well not me anymore, i just integrate the service pack into my source, then next time i recover my PC's the service pack (and any other updated software i added) is taken care of with no further effort at all, all clean installs, none of this upgrading malarkey.

My intention was to just try and promote this method a little, make people aware of it, that's all... I'm well aware that both methods have their place, the choice is up to the user which all depends on their particular requirements.

Regards :)

Sparks, you mention program configuration, i agree that's one of the major things we want to avoid, hate having to go through all those serial and option boxes etc... It depends on the program really tho, most of the time it's probably possible, i know some programs store their settings in a config file in program files, others can use the registry (my preference), or some other way... so it's just case of saving the relevant settings (if they exist) from an already configured installation -- then you have it to be automatically merged or copied over during the unattended install routine. Most of the programs i use I'm quite happy with the default settings tho, so as long as i can register them silently I'm happy. I find it much more economical to just backup some reg or config files of just a few k than it is to backup whole installations (several times over).

As to the multi CD installations, that can get a bit more tedious i admit, but if you only have a few of these types of software then it shouldn't be too big a deal to do it the normal way as long as you don't need to do it too often... But there are sometimes ways around this... the CD's might be able to be merged together onto a DVD (or even the hard drive) to run the installation...

Software like MS office will allow you to create an admin installation point where you can run through a wizard that will ask what you want to have installed and save it to a file for future use. I expect a lot of MS software is very friendly in this respect.

If worst comes to worst, there's always the last resort of using installation monitoring/tracking software that will allow you to repackage any software you like and silently install it to your requirements, I've not gone down that route yet, I usually use alternative software if i can, or just put up with manually installing those few programs on that odd occation.

Hope that's of some help :)

Photo Lady, you mentioned you were moving to a 80GB drive from your current 20GB. Assuming you have XP installed, install your 80GB as slave on your Seconday IDE channel - you can instal it as Primary slave, but this configuration will speed the process.

After install, Open My Computer--->Control Panel--->Admin Tools-->Computer Management-->Disk Management.

This will allow you to partition and format your new drive. Create a Primary partition to be your new Windows partition. I assume the partition can be 20GB or smaller, if smaller I assume Ghost will adjust properly as Drive Image will. Create and format any other partitions using Disk Managment, and then Ghost your operating system partition over to the new partition/drive. Swap your drive positions and now you can erase your old XP and you are up and running as if nothing had changed except now you have 100GB rather 20GB and more than 1 partition. BTW make a ghost copy of your operating system to the new drive before yoy swap, so you have a good backup image just on the extremely rare event when something blips and your system is fubared.

Everybody's got their own preferences and needs, so to each their own. And its always good to toss out as many alternatives as possible.

Having said that though, the unattended install concept is aimed at deployment, installation, replication. It is not really aimed at backing up and restoring. Sure you can use an unattended install procedure as a means of backup/restore just the same as you can use something like ghost as a deployment tool. Certainly Ghost is not the perfect all around backup tool, it has its shortcomings. But (IMHO) it does provide a better, faster backup/checkpointing/restoration capability than an unattended install procedure. And as your system's software, configuration, settings, etc get more numerous, more elaborate, then both the maintenance and updating time of the unintended install setup as well as the run time when you do the unintended install start growing, and growing substantially.

As an aid and means of speeding up installations and deployments unintended installs can be great. But as a means of more quickly and painlessly both checkpointing and restoring one's system I feel something like Ghost is better suited.

Like I say though, its always good to hear the options and different methods people use.

DrMDJ, That certainly helps put things in perspective. Good points. More to ponder.

As I have said from what people do a person can come up with something that works maybe better and so it goes on and on.

That sums it up rather nicely Doc...

As you point out there is some maintenance required for an unattended install, I'll give a brief overview of the maintenance process i encounter with my setup, i feel it's quite minimal in my situation so thought I'd explain it.

For my software and drivers it's a case of replacing the existing installation package with a newer version, then for windows updates they just go into another specified folder, i also have to adjust/create the necessary references to these files in the scripts that install them. Not very time consuming, mostly just a bit of copy/pasting and editing a line of a script with notepad is all.

For convenience/speed i keep the installation source on my hard drive and update it as and when updates are released, makes it quicker that way... Then to create an ISO of the installation source I run a batch file which builds the ISO to my second drive with a single click.

I can then test the ISO in VMware whenever needed, and only need to burn off a new CD as and when i need to do a new installation (assuming any worthwhile updates have been made since the last CD i burnt).

I agree that Ghost would give more instant satisfaction for most needs, especially for a novice, although for us "geekier" types that enjoy tinkering anyway, we can build this and reap the benefits from the project once it's complete. Even if it is intended for mass deployments and such, once the initial building process is over it's all smooth sailing from there on (at-least, it has been for me so far).

A critical point I'd like to make about the way i set up my PC's that makes all this possible: I NEVER store wanted personal data files on my system drive (ie, any important file i or the system creates or downloads goes to another partition/drive), when i used Ghost I did the same thing too, I would also recommend others to do the same, so then one can wipe the system drive at any time without losing those important files that are stored in another location.

Like ya say "its always good to toss out as many alternatives as possible"...

Regards :)

Perhaps the key is that people should find what ever works for them. There are tools and variations galore, and the possibilities have only been scratched in this thread (so far). But FIND and USE SOMETHING. Some strategy, some tool. Backing up is never "cool", certainly not the sexiest part of computing. But having the ability to restore a system, restore some files, back out some change more quickly or even "period" will sooner or later pay dividends.

Makes me wonder how many more neat little "tools" are out there that we don't know about - yet. :)

Cheers Doc, clear and to the point as always.

GG1, speaking of "tools" have ya taken a look at BartPE, it's a Bootable CD that runs a cut down version of XP from it, once booted from this CD you can access FAT or NTFS partitions, network shares and even run Nero or Ghost (as well as other utilities) from it, provides a really neat way of getting access to a non booting system for repair or data backup etc.

...anyways, trying to keep it brief, I'm gunna take a back seat for the moment to allow other more "mainstream" methods to be discussed, lets see where the rest of this thread takes us aye...

Regards :)

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Makes me wonder how many more neat little "tools" are out there...

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There's plenty, that's for sure.

We had a thread here a while back (couple years ago it seems) on diagnostic tools, fancy-smancy boot disks, and the like. Things people can and do have in their arsenal for troubleshooting, diagnosis, recovery, etc. Might be time to open (or try to) a seperate discssion on some of that stuff.

Thanks for the heads up Lotus - will have a look. :)

Not a bad idea DrMDJ. One reason to do it is to show "How To" use programs and applications to keep your computer a happy camper so to speak. :)

It would be interesting to know

a) Has this thread started by Philgo (which I'm not sure was intended to turn in to a full blown thread, but we took care of that;) :D ) encouraged people who had not been backing up to start doing so?

b) How many people actually follow some sort of backup strategy (be it full blown or just backing up certain files)?

Yeah, that sure would be good to know, also if anyone has any questions regarding backup strategy's then do feel free to join in, were here to help. :)

BTW, good idea for the new "toolbox" thread.

Regards :)

DrMDJ, I started one these threads a while ago and I got a message from someone thanking me.

They had just done a backup after seeing my thread and their HDD failed a few days later, it made me feel good anyway.

Your periodic reminders are good. I wish (and hope) they would spur everyone on to take some sort of action.

question for Philgo.

1) how do you handle say an hp machine that now a days has the restore cds on the hidden partition it creates ???

2) if your doing this process to a partition you create using ghost and then if c: drive fails how are you accessing the d: drive ???

what i have been seeing lately with hp machines is that when the c: drive goes it for whatever reason is corrupting the restore partition also. drive passes tests but the f10 to begin the restore function has been failing a lot lately on hp machines.

what i do with my clients instead of the backup procedure you detailed which is excellent is i use whatever burning software they have and do a set backup routine that backups all data including emails and address book, favorites and the such. i then stress the importance of them running the routine on a regular basis depending on how much data they keep adding to their system.

are you also keeping a copy of the image for your clients on your server or whatever in case the whole drive dies ??? if so are you not taking up a lot of your resources to store these images ???

dont get me wrong i think you procedure for protecting your system is excellent am just trying to get as much information as i can so i can help my clients.

gghartman, luckily for me I only rarely have to deal with branded machines, most of them have been built by me.

Most times for other people I just leave the image of their C drive on the second partition and on a DVD. If anything then happened to the other partition, I could manually copy the partition back to the drive and restore from there.

I haven't yet got around to automatting the process.

Philgo

How the heck are you making any monies now adays building your own machines and selling them. Companies like Dell, HP are selling them so cheap these days that your profit margin has to be just about break even.

I knew I was doing something wrong, I didn't realise that I should make money:D

I was only doing it as a sideline for friends and family, but my family seems to be getting bigger.

You must be independently weathly. Amazing how the family can grow when you give such good deals.

Glad your oversees and not giving your systems away where I am.

I'm moving soon to a place called Sarona:D

its a long way from kent england so youd better sell a couple machine for a profit first. we unfortunately just re-elected bush so its going to get even more expensive living in america.

I wanted to resurrect this thread, because of what has happened to one of our members. He has been dutifully backing up his files, only to find that when he needed them, they were corrupt.

I read a magazine article where a large business had a server failure, and it was only then that they discovered that their tape backup had been corrupting the data on every tape. I gather it cost them a very great deal of money on that occasion. It costs some firms their entire business :eek:

There is a lesson for everyone here, it's no good just making a backup and forgetting about it, if the data is important, then check the integrity of the data as well.

even on tape backups there is usually a verify function which goes through the data and matches to the source to make sure it is correct and without errors. think your friend should think about turning that switch on.

Nonetheless, Spark's point is well taken (and often not done).

If I use a CDR for a anything important, I burn two copies on different makes of disk. In the hope that they both will not fail at the same time.

Reiterating abit. Back up to CD (check the CD). Save image to another drive. Save on another computer. Real easy to save daily work if important to anywhere else but the drive you are working on.

If it is important enough to have in a file - back it up - always.

I am the master Backup.:D

Actually, I am so freaken anal, I backup my important data every night. I back up my stuff on 4 different levels.

-Daily - Personal Data backup on CD but break down by subjects and another copy on a separate hard drive. If you are wondering why I backup data to CD and not DVD is because not all computer has DVD Rom.
-Monthly = All Personal Data backup on DVD
-Bi-Monthly = Update OS with upgrade
-Yearly = I keep an extra copy of DVD at my mom's house unless my house gets burn down.

I am kind of anal with my data because I have documents, pictures, and researches that are over 12 years.

I have two hard drives. One is for the OS and the other is for Data. The one for the OS, I split it into two partitions so that I also have a temp area(Partition) too.

The data hard drive is a pull out and that never ever touches the internet. Once, I plug that in, the internet gets disconnected. I guess the only other way my data can get mess up is if a virus has already landed on my computer before I disconnect from the internet. Nevertheless, I can always fall back on the Monthly Backup or Hard drive. I even wrote a program in Excel to compare file/folder properties of differences - to give me an analysis of what changed. I do that once a week to make sure nothing get corrupted.

I highly do recommend Norton Ghost, PhotoLady. Ghost is probably one of the best program ever made. You don't know how many time it has saved my rear. As a programmer, I work with registry manipulation quite often. If you mess up the registry, you can be in trouble but Ghost will have it back up in less than 6 minutes.

Make sure when you Ghost, your file system is NTSF. It makes a huge difference in speed compared to Fat32.

Also, I do reimage my computer every night using Ghost thanks to the kind Doc for introducing the ATXOFF.com to me.

If you split the partition correctly, you will only need to reimage your OS. Why do I do this? Just incase of malicious virus sitting in the background.

http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...hreadid=175497

Thought I'd drop a gentle reminder again.