How I Doing Backup

Willeth

So my PC is kind of okay. It should be serviceable for everything I'm wanting to do on it. But I'm running a three-year-old install of XP on here and both hard drives are pretty much filled to capacity with useless stuff, and it's making it run like shit when it should just be okay. Trouble is, I'm a messy bastard and none of it's in any sort of order.

I want to backup all my files to an external 1TB drive I have, so that I can format the box and do a fresh XP install just to give it a bit more life until I can afford a proper upgrade - with the added bonus of having all my shit on this portable hard drive for when I do. If I was able to go through methodically and transfer everything from my clusterfuck of a hard drive to the 1TB drive and organise it in the process, I would, but that takes time, and I'm at the point where I can't wait too long to have a working computer again. It's at the point where every now and again my VM page file will fill, and the computer will just crash out and restart.

I elected to just select-all and copy all the files over to the hard drive, and sort it out later. I have two drives, C and F. F was perfect transfer, but C has all my Windows shit and a lot of program files on it and so will transfer up to a point and then fail because it can't transfer a file, either because of permissions or because it's in use. Which then means I have to start the transfer all over again.

So! My question is - how do I ensure I have a full backup of everything on this drive before I wipe it? I'm looking for something that doesn't expect me to reinstate it back onto another drive - just a method that'll let me have all the files on my 1TB for me to sort through at my leisure.

travathian

You could boot to a linux live cd and from within linux copy all the contents of the drive.

There are also true backup utilities that will have the computer reboot and they run before the OS starts and automagically back things up.

You could use something like Synctoy to do the copy/paste and it'll suppress error messages and just give you a log at the end indicating which didnt get copied.

Lastly, once you have your clean XP install, go here: http://ninite.com/

General_Win

In the future you should probably try to keep your music in your "My music" folder, your pictures in "My pictures" and your videos in "my videos", your programs in "program files".

I used to fight the power too but then you forget and lose things.

Once you have your files in those folders 75% of your problems are solved.

The rest of your clutter is going to be documents and stuff. Which can just be put in "my documents" you could even create a folder for a specific kind of document. Like if you're in school and have school assignments, you could make a folder called "school" and put your school stuff in there.

You could also make a folder called "downloads" and put all your downloads in there.

After that you have 99% of your problems solved.

Willeth

travathian wrote: »

You could boot to a linux live cd and from within linux copy all the contents of the drive.

There are also true backup utilities that will have the computer reboot and they run before the OS starts and automagically back things up.

You could use something like Synctoy to do the copy/paste and it'll suppress error messages and just give you a log at the end indicating which didnt get copied.

Lastly, once you have your clean XP install, go here: http://ninite.com/

I tried a LiveCD as my first option, but for some reason it wouldn't work. It'd sit at the C: prompt and my monitor would flash on and off. I know the CD works, too, as I installed Ubuntu on my laptop from it.

Synctoy looks like exactly what I want though, thanks.

General_Win - I know that's what I need to get to. It's getting there that's the problem.

Roland_tHTG

One thing you could do if you're so inclined is to use something like everything to find all of certain file types on your current drives and copy them over into folders rather than just tossing the whole drive in there to do it later.

I say this from experience since I know I have at least three different "desktop" folders tossed into mine that I've never sorted out from multiple installs.

Willeth

Roland_tHTG wrote: »

One thing you could do if you're so inclined is to use something like everything to find all of certain file types on your current drives and copy them over into folders rather than just tossing the whole drive in there to do it later.

I say this from experience since I know I have at least three different "desktop" folders tossed into mine that I've never sorted out from multiple installs.

Ooh, that's really useful. I was thinking of doing that simply with a search, but this is much better.