In news:eHvY0%23j$IHA.1152@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl,
Patrick Keenan typed on Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:58:11 -0400:
> "Tony" <news@t-onywoolf.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:kxVok.42446$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.

For starters, my ntbackup *does* incremental backups! And before you use
something like Acronis TrueImage, you better be sure it actually works. I
mean replace your hard drive with a fresh hard drive and make sure the thing
actually works! You will be surprised how many make backups and then learn
when their hard drive fails that things like Acronis TrueImage was set wrong
or simply doesn't work at all. And no! If you don't use ASR or other imaging
software, it doesn't have to be on another drive.

--
Bill
Black Asus EEE PC 4GB 2GB SoDIMM Adata 16GB
Windows XP SP2 and Xandros Linux