www.aiscl.co.uk

Hi,

Just confirming I have this right...

I'd like to back up to alternate portable Harddrives, swapping them weekly, to enable me to store an HDD off-site.

Thus I'd have say an "Even" and an Odd" week HDD. I'd have two Jobs: "Even Week" and "Odd Week", each Job would specify the same files to be backed up i.e the entire system

On Even Weeks I'd back up daily to the Even Drive and then at the end of the week swap to the "Odd" Drive (and then take the "Even" Drive off-site). I'd then backup daily to the Odd Drive and then at the end of the week swap with the Even Drive and so on for following weeks

Is that the right way to do it?

Now, in the event I need to recover, and this is a separate question I know. I have an IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad, one of those systems where they don't supply you with System Disks! What's the best way to recover, given I don't have a Windows Disk to boot from in the first place?

I do have Win XP disks for other systems...would it be feasible to load one of those to get the system going and then replace that OS via the AIS restore? Or will the Registration Keys cause a conflict? I'm not worried about M$oft licensing as I'm not intending to use a license on two machines...rather, I'm using it as the Windows equivalent of a set of jumper leads!

I'm running Win XP Pro SP2

Thanks,
Patrick

The kind of backup you require may be achieved with one backup job, using the option to backup to more than one external drive. The benefit of this kind of job is that it does not matter when the external drives are swapped, AISBackup will ‘catch up’ each time the drive is swapped. AISBackup will even work if both drives are connected, it backs up to the drive containing the oldest backup.

The Copy / Clone option does not work with ‘multiple destination’ backup’s, if you want to do this instead use the two job option you mentioned earlier.

Using another PC to restore a backup is a good idea, and if possible try this before you really need to use it, this way you will be able to restore after a disaster with confidence.

Another way of recovering ‘dead’ systems is by using a pre-installed environment boot CD, for example BartPE see:

http://www.aiscl.co.uk/XPESB.htm

I do not see anything wrong with installing Windows XP from another system to recover a legitimate version of Windows, in fact it is the product key which identifies you as the registered user of Windows and not the physical media Windows is on. However, knowing Microsoft, they distinguish between upgrade, non-upgrade and OEM copies of Windows on the physical install CD, if this is the case just use the product ID from the system it is from, you are not going to register this version of Windows, just use it to restore the legitimate version you have on backup. Having said all that it is surely quicker to restore Windows using a different PC.

Real world example:

A laptop containing a multi boot system was backed up over a wireless network to a desktop PC. Windows ME and Windows Server 2000 were backed up as two separate jobs. The total backup size was 6GB Windows ME and 7GB Windows 2000.

A 9GB laptop drive was already in a FireWire caddie, but this was too small to restore the backup. However, as I only wanted Windows 2000 this was no problem, except as this is a dual boot system the boot files are on the Windows ME Partition.

Solution:

Create a FAT32 partition on the restore disk of 1GB (this could have been much smaller).

Create an NTFS partition on the remainder of the disk.

VERY IMPORTANT: Mark the FAT32 partition as ACTIVE or it will not boot.

Restore the boot files from the Windows ME backup – I pretended I did not know what they were so I restored all files from the root of the C: drive to the FAT 32 drive.

Restored Windows 2000 to the NTFS partition.

Remove the disk from the caddie and remove the disk from the laptop. On this laptop, a Dell Inspiron, I had to move a socket from the laptop drive to the restored drive before installing the disk into the laptop (and move the facia).

Boot laptop, menu shown, Windows 2000 selected , bomb out!! I forgot that Windows 2000 was originally on the third partition of the drive so I had to put the disk back in the caddy and edit the boot.ini file, except I did not do it that way, I edited the boot.ini on the desktop to boot Windows 2000 from drive 0, partition 2 and made a bootable CD using AISBackup (new in version 2.3). For some reason the generic boot CD did not work – so that needs fixing.

On booting the laptop I edited the boot menu to boot from partition 2, and re-booted successfully.

Barry