"Tony" <news@t-onywoolf.co.uk> wrote in message
news:kxVok.42446$E41.22617@text.news.virginmedia.c om...
>I want to create an ASR in case of problems when installing SP3. But it
>seems that ASR insists on copying pretty well the whole contents of my C
>drive.

Yes, that is its entire purpose.

> It certainly does all of "My Documents" and "Shared Documents", so I would
> need media capable of holding 50+ GB. This is fine if you have a tape
> drive or a spare HD installed, which I don't. But I already have full
> backups of my own data on DVD and USB drive. All I need from ASR is the
> system files. So, can I stop the ASR wizard backing up "My Documents" and
> "Shared Documents"?

Not without moving those folders, or their contents, to another drive.

> Or is there another way to be able to get the system working again if all
> goes wrong? What do other folks do? Personal document backup and system
> backup are not the same thing after all.

Personally, and I know many others who do this, I use Acronis TrueImage in
two ways.

First:
I create an image of the system drive on an external disk.
I create a scheduled task to update that image, once a month. Yes, this
also takes any data on the system drive. But this part is incremental,
something ASR and ntbackup can't do, so the increment image is much smaller
than the original.

Second:
I use the Backup functions of TrueImage to save the data / email / settings.
Then I schedule another incremental backup of those, which runs daily.

In the case of the system cratering, the Acronis boot CD will allow me to
restore the system image, and then restore the latest data and settings.
And it won't require a floppy.

If you don't want ASR (or any imaging software) to backup your data, you
have to keep the data on another drive.

HTH
-pk

> --
> Tony W
> My e-mail address has no hyphen
> - but please don't use it, reply to the group.
>