I just successfully used Acronis’ Universal Restore. This is an optional tool for their disk imaging software. This is of course not a Delphi or development topic, but I think making realiable backups is important for developers as well.
Since quite a while I own a copy of True Image from
full backup copies (images) of your hard disk. In the case of emergency you can
take your most recent backup and just restore the full disk (or single
partitions).
The advantage of Disk Images is that you will be back up with a working
system in minutes. The disadvantage is that the size of a full image might
become pretty big, and won’t fit on DVD-RW’s or so. Even with my 120GB 2″ USB
drive the capacity is limited of course – my about 60GB on my working machine
compress down to a 30GB image file.
Incremental Images
Acronis True Image offers so called ”Incremental” images. They
only take the changes compared to the last backup and write these to a
small partial image file. This is a great technique, as it even allows you
to access all old version of files if you are looking for last month’s
business expense xls fiel, which you just overwrote by accident.
Frequent back ups
Well, we all know you should create backups frequently – but do you
really do them? Esp. if the backup tool “stinks”, then the backup frequency goes
down to a dangerous level. In other words the software to make backups
should really work easy.
One thing that makes True Image easy is that it is cappable of doing backups
while you are working. Of course the best way to make a backup is to
shut down your machine and start TrueImage from a bootable CD and the have
it run – but thats nasty. The trade off of making an image while the system
is running is that the status of the image will be like when you
switched off the power. It takes the current state of all files.
Does it work?
Well, making backups is easy and you might feel safe. But did you ever try to
restore fomr your backups?
I restored a couple of times with TrueImage and it really worked!! Connect
your USB drive, boot off the TrueImage CD and select the image you want. I had
not a single error yet.
Today I tried a brand new feature: Universal Restore. This
is similiar of a traditional restore, the difference is that it allows you to
restore to a new hardware. I had to exchange my mainboard due to a
hardware failure, and when I tried to boot, I ended up with a blue screen. Of
course, the chipset changed and the old drivers just crashed. So I fired up
universal restore and had it restore the image I took, right before I changed
the mainboard.
This Universal Restore makes Windows search for new drivers first. So my
Windows came back with 640×480 but it worked. It started detecting all drivers
and after a few minutes everything was working fine again.
$110 spent well!
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