My disk array (RAID 1) has been giving me odd errors lately so last night I went out and grabbed a 500 Gig external USB drive ($119 at Best Buy - not a bad deal really).
I decided to try the built-in Vista backup. Hook up the disk, run the tool and a coupla hours later all of my 300 Gig was backed up to the external drive. It was providence: this morning the system wouldn't boot: RAID Array "degraded". I was a bit worried about the restore process (this was always a sticking point in XP) but I was pleasently suprised. After I used the BIOS tools You just pop in the Vista boot disc (the DVD) and choose "repair". You can then choose to try and repair the existing OS (if any) or restore from backup. Just choose the hard drive and pick which disks you'd like restored. You can choose to format the drive(s) before restoring or not. The full restore took about 2 hours (again about 300 Gig of data across five logical drives). One INCREDIBLY neat thing is that the Backup utility actually stores your backup as VHD (Virtual Hard Drive) files (used by Virtual PC). This means that you can see the contents of a backup using the free edition of Virtual PC or the free "VHD Mounter". In short this means that even if your machine goes belly-up you can still easily get at all your files from another machine. I can't honestly see a more elegant way to handle it. In any case right now my machine is back. I'm going to see how it goes for a day or two but I think I'm going to switch to the other RAID controller on the machine - unfortunaely this means I'll have to modify the case (the other controller's port face sideways on the mobo and there's not enough room to pull a cable in unless I cut away a bit of the drive cage). But despite my problems I think MS finally got back-up exactly right. Jim Davis ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Get the answers you are looking for on the ColdFusion Labs Forum direct from active programmers and developers. http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/categories.cfm?forumid-72&catid=648 Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/message.cfm/messageid:239508 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.5
