TechNTools

How I avoided grief with Drive Snapshot.

Late last year I built a new pc. I also installed a retail version of Windows XP Home. After rebooting multiple times and 3 hours, I finally had the operating system installed. Then I spent the next few nights installing all of my favorite applications, restoring my data and tweaking the settings until everything was just right.

At this point I installed Drive Snapshot from www.drivesnapshot.de. This program creates a byte for byte backup so the next time I have a computer issue, I can just restore the backup to this same point and time. Well that time came sooner than later.

I tried a tip from www.Lifehacker.com to find out if my computer was secretly connecting to the web. Sure enough, I found two entries that programs were trying to call out. So time to put Drive Snapshot to the test!

First off I had to dig out an old 3.5″ floppy drive. Yes this turned my stomach too. Good thing I didn’t have time this past weekend to venture to the hazardous waste recycling center!

Drive Snapshot will create a bootable floppy based on FreeDOS. Once you reboot the computer and boot into FreeDOS you’re ready to restore your Drive Snapshot backup. You can’t run the restore from Windows, hence the necessity for the floppy.

SNAPSHOT RESTORE HD1 AUTO C:\DRIVES~1\DRIVEI~1SNA -Y -V

…and I was on my way! You’ll want to run a SNAPSHOT SHOW HD1 to be sure you have the right drive. If you have multiple drives you’d run SNAPSHOT SHOW HD2, etc. I didn’t have to repartition the drive since I was maintaining the same partitions.

The restore ran for about an hour for 23MB of data. That’s a lot less than the hours of installing and tweaking. Now for the big test, reboot!

Wow, it works! That’s scary awesome.

Drive Snapshot has a new customer, hope you are one too.

Jude