Hi,

after much help from this site in the past I have been using Norton Ghost 2003 to create images of my C drive on an external USB drive. This is all working very well and I do a whole 'housekeeping' every 2 - 3 weeks that ends with another drive image.

I tell you, the first time this worked I ...... felt very good  ;D

However, it has occured to me that should things go bad, say on day 19 after the last image was made, i'd still be in trouble. The advice i'd like please is what should I backup daily to get my system to a working state with the last drive image.

I already backup outlook .pst and money .mny files on DVD

My system is XP pro SP2 - dithering over moving to SP3, I have a Seagate ST3320620AS 320GB Serial ATA hard drive. This is partitioned as follows

C - system 25G NTFS
E - Apps (games etc) 60G NTFS
F- DOS 5G FAT32
G - DATA 1 104G (NTFS)
H - DATA 2 104G (NTFS)

C is a primary partition, the others are all in the extended partition.

What I imagine is a 'one click backup' icon on my desktop that backups up all the settings etc to a DVD. The problem I have is that I don't know enough to know which files and folders I need to backup to make this work.

Any help / advice greatly appreciated!

Will.

William,

I guess you are concerned about losing data files created during that 3 week period. There are lots of apps that will backup changed data, automatically, no user intervention, as many times a day as you like. I use SecondCopy 7.

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/notes.htm#13

Hi Brian,

Thanks for getting back to me. What I am asking is

'what files and folders do I need to backup daily to return my system to the same state it was in at the point of backup?'

So should I be backing up 'documents and settings'?

Is there anything else I should backup so that when I restore a 3 week old image my System (windows) partition is as it was the last time I ran a backup, as opposed to created an image?

I guess the point is I just don't have enough knowledge to know which system files and folders change regularly and need backing up. (I am not worried about 'download' and temp folders here!)

I am happy that I am already backing up my own data (email, money files, and important docs). I sync my firefox bookmarks with a program called syncit that enables me to have the same bookmarks on both my desktop and laptop. Everything else I can lose / reinstall or reburn if the worst happens.

The reason I am asking is that I don't want to pay for software when windows has backup software supplied. If I was willing to pay, Secondcopy 7 looks really good. I'm just cheap! ;)

Will

Will,

I think you need to separate your data from your OS as suggested in Dan's Backup article. Christer tells you how to do it here..

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=49222

The moved folders are the ones to backup daily.

Karen's Replicator is a free alternative to Second Copy 7.

http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp

Hi Brian,

Thank you again for the quick response and the useful links! It has increased my knowledge (not a very difficult task ::))

Will.