Laptop Backup

elevmike

Member
Join Date
Feb 2004
Location
Detroit, MI
Posts
4,012
Ok so my sister has to send her XP Home laptop to Dell for servicing. Before putting it in the mail, I thought I could just copy the entire C drive onto my XP machine via the network.

So what I did was map the drive then do a Copy-Paste of the entire drive. After a few files get copied, the process stops and I get a message that a file is in use or write protected--access denied, then the entire copy thing stops. I'm NOT the IT guy, but I just want to make a quick full backup of her drive...

Any suggestions???

Thanks,
 
You won't be able to do a direct copy because of the services that are running and using some of the files on your drive (ie. windows, modems, security software, etc...) You should be able to do a system backup (start/programs/accessories/sytem tools/backup) and accomplish what you are trying to do. Otherwise, if you are just trying to save personal files, I would just copy those to a CD or other computer.
 
If all you need to do is grab personal files that's pretty easy; if you need to grab emails and address book from outlook express its a bit more complicated, but not too bad (I can walk you through it pretty easily).

If you want to make a full exact copy of the whole thing then I suggest Norton Ghost 2003; I've been using Ghost for making exact backups of computers for lots of years and the 2003 version allows you to write directly to DVD or CD and then restore from DVD or CD by booting off the discs it created.
 
Thanks, I found the backup utility on my PC and it seems to be working...

She has stuff all over, (poor housekeeping), so it's not just the email and documents. Personally I direct all my applications to store files under a "Workdata" folder, then subfolders under that. So I just copy my "Workdata".

Hopefully we can look for and extract individual files and folders from the full backup later??,,,if necessary.
 
????

Her drive properties show 11.5 gb of used space, but the backup utility shows the extimated backup size at 1.7 gb. Does it compress by that much? or could I be missing something?
 
Can't do that Mike !! it won't work even if you could .
Download yourself a copy of Ghost - I can't survive without it , and it saves having to reinstal S7 and the 3 million components that go with it when windows starts to get messing and corrupted . I can be back running with a clean config in 15 minutes flat .
Ideal way of upgrading a hard drive too .
 
Arggg!

Ok so the ms backup utility skipped 80% of the files on the disk, "access denied".

Is this a permission issue? or will Ghost overcome this?
 
elevmike

Sorry for the misinformation. I wasn't aware of the problems with the backup/ restore in MS XP, just knew it existed.
 
Mike, yes Ghost will overcome your problems. Ghost doesn't actually run under Windows when it makes the copy of the drive so there are no locked files, etc. It literally makes a copy of your drive, very literally. If you need to get to any of the files in the ghost image you can use Ghost Explorer to access them without having to restore the image to a computer.
 
Ghost runs under it's own executive, so can image an entire drive without Windows being up and running (and locking things).

But, every time I send a laptop to Dell, I just pull out the hard drive.

Unless you have an actual hard drive problem, they don't need it to repair the unit.
 

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