Hi

I am a complete noob and I feel kinda lost of how to approach my backups.

I have never really did too much with backups all I did was when I installed my windows after a format I made a backup with Powerquest.

I want to now install vista so I decided to get norton ghost(since powerquest does not exist anymore lol)

This is what I want.

I am thinking of having 3 operating system Vista,XP,Ubuntu.

So when I reinstall Xp I will just make a one time backup after my format and thats about it since this will be only used for a couple things and not much will be happening on it so I doubt I will need to have too many backups for it.

Ubuntu again for now I won't be using very much just for some class work I have to do(also not too sure if works with linux(i am guessing no)). So i don't know at this point if I will bother making a backup for it.

Vista will be my main drive I will be using everyday.

I was thinking of having a setup like this.

4backups total(going back one month) backed up every week.

So:

Week 1 - image1
Week 2 - image2
week 3 - image3
week 4 - image 4
week 5- image 5 overrides image 1

So I think have always a month of backups is pretty good.

So I am not sure how to go about this. When I went to the backup scheduler they had an option Recovery point set (recommended) and I am not sure if I should use something like this.

Like would it work with my situation? Since how it sounds to me that I would need to keep all  my images since it just backs up the new stuff.

As you can see I have no clue so if you can help me out or give me a tutorial to help me out that would be really good.

Also how do I validate if a image is good? Like I know powerquest had an thing where it would check to see if the image would work.

And is the recovery disk the actual cd or do I have to make one. I know when I had powequest I would just pop it in dos and it would load up powerquest in dos so I could recover is it the same sort of idea with norton?
Thanks.

Hey
I was playing around with Recovery point set (recommended) stuff and I had a few questions on it.

Say if I did this. I made today a backup using the Recovery point setting then I said everyday at 11pm I made a backup and did this at everyday till the end of the month.

So in the end of the month I would have the base image plus  14 recovery point ones(since I think there is like 14 days left.)

Then when the new month would start I would start a new base image and then have a recovery point set for everyday so this time 31.

My questions are:

1. Would this mean if I had to recover say on July 1st I could go back to 14 days since I have 14 recovery points plus the base image?

2.  if say I got those recovery points from 1 to 14 and I loose(corrupt or something like that) recovery point 13. Would a chain effect happen? Like Can I not use 14 if I loose 13 or could I just skip 13 and still use 14?

3. How would I do something like this(what I proposed at the top)?

Would I "set a limit for number of recovery point sets saved for this backup"? or would I turn this off?
Would I then go to the "schedule" and to every day at 11pm
and then set "start new recovery point set(base)" to monthly?

Would this achieve a base recover point every month and recovery point set for each day of that month?

4. Would it be possible to set norton ghost to delete the base after every 5th base is made? So in this case now I would have 4 months of backups. Or is this something I have to manually?

5. I notice when I am practicing using the norton ghost backup scheduler when it wants to start the image at the time I wanted it asks for permission to start can you disable that? Since I am planning to make it at times I am not at the computer.

6. Do you guys think this is a good idea to do something like I proposed or should I approach it a different way?

Thanks

Brian wrote on Jun 17^th, 2007 at 4:01pm:


Ok I think I am going to try to make a incremental recovery point and have 4 base points before I delete one that should limit the chance of something going wrong(unless hard-drive failure.  I can't cover for that one since I am only planning to have one external backup that will be just a fresh install.)

I think I will have enough space to all this since I just bought a new hard-drive(500gb) for mainly backup purposes and to be able to run 3 operating systems.

I also have 2 more hard-drives(35and 80gb) so some of the operating system stuff will go on these.

I think I will have at least 200gb(probably alot more to a point of even 300gb) for just backups.

So I will see how that goes and hopefully it will as be good. I just have one more question at this time though.

If I would do a recovery and I want to recover from incremental number 15(out of say 30) I would just choose the 15th one and norton would just use the first 15 incremental ones right? I don't have to do anything special.

Thanks for all your help.

Oh I have another question. How do I check to make sure a image was made proper without using it to restore?

I remember in powerquest they had an option after you made the image that you could check to make sure if it was sucessful.

Thanks

Chobo2, please see "Verifying a recovery point after creation" on page 68 of the Norton Ghost 12 User's Manual.

chobo2,

Has the recovery CD arrived yet? You can't restore a recovery point without this CD. You cannot create this CD yourself.

Brian wrote on Jun 18^th, 2007 at 3:47pm:


Um I have the cd it came on and I can use that to load up in dos. I could even use my old image from powerquest and do a backup with it.