----- Original Message ----- From: "Jan-Erik Soderholm" To: Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2005 8:49 AM Subject: RE: [PIC] AVG Antivirus reporting trojan in MPLAB > I'm still not sure of that you could make a full, restorable > image backup from a *running* W2K system (that is, Dunno about W2K, but Ghost does a good job of making a restorable backup on XP. Symantic has been making it a pain with their activation which doesn't always work right, and their totally useless support. I had a lot of trouble with Ghost on my wife's system earlier in the year ... had to go back to an older version of Ghost for it to work. When I got a new system and had to get yet another copy, the new version works fine. (Well, it seems to.... I haven't actually done a restore from the new version yet). > a backup of the *currently* booted system disk). With > no system/application downtime, of course ! The latest Ghost does run from a running system. Earlier versions shut down the OS. A pain, but in my view, a lot safer. > Preferable using tool included in the OS distribution, > not some 3'rd part tools. That's far to risky for such > important tasks as backups ! Well, I agree for a lot of things. But there are certain areas MS hasn't gone (yet) and backup is one of them. M$ has gotten a lot of heat, especially in Europe, for including everything in the OS. So they provide minimal versions of some things essentially to provide an opening for third party tools. Before SP2, the firewall was in this category. Connection sharing before XP. Backup is still in this category. M$ does provide Windows Backup on the Windows CD, but it is not installed by default. The application isn't half bad, actually, although there is little documentation. However, it will not make a full image backup. The other REALLY BAD feature of Windows backup is that each version has been incompatible with the version before. That means that any backups you made in the past are useless after you upgrade. And with Windows, sometimes an upgrade is silently hidden in a service pack. I do use Windows Backup for incremental backups. Its pretty good at that, and incrementals have a short life so the compatibility isn't an issue. I use Ghost routinely for full backups. All of *my* important files are also kept on a Samba share. I back those up regularly too, using Zip. Zip has been available across many operating systems for many years, and has always done sensible things when crossing operating systems. So my real archival backups can be read by virtually any OS. I can't restore the Windows system from the zips, that's what Ghost is for. And if I'm trying to do a full system restore, compatiability isn't an issue, either. Recovering a single file from a Ghost backup is a bit of a pain. Sometimes it can take a lot of swapping DVDs. But nine times out of ten I can simply go to my Samba share, or if the file is really old, to the Linux backup DVD. BTW, Ghost is a wonderful thing when you want to upgrade that laptop hard drive. Most laptops don't support two drives, but you simply boot from the Ghost backup DVD and restore the old image. Ghost will restore to a different size partition, so after the upgrade you have your old system back, no hassles, just with a larger drive. --McD -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist