Backup Hard Drive Questions

I want to try the photoshop beta product but it says to "back up your hard drive including all data, content, software programs, etc. " and I really dont know the best way to do all that. I thought I did but I could be wrong so if someone will show me where to get the info or how to I greatly appreciate it.

I want to try the photoshop beta product but it says to "back up your hard drive including all data, content, software programs, etc. " and I really dont know the best way to do all that. I thought I did but I could be wrong so if someone will show me where to get the info or how to I greatly appreciate it.

I use Ghost 10 with great success. Here is the website for you to browse if that is the way you would like to go.

Ghost 12 is the latest software now.

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl

Hope this helps,

kind regards,

dont want to sound rude but I dont like anything NORTON I never have luck and always seem to have problems out the ying yang. Any othe suggestions?

Hi, As well as tallin's excellent suggestion, you can use any drive imaging application. I use Acronis, but you could try Drive Image, or Paragon if you don't like Ghost. The warning about backing up is given because the application you are considering installing is a Beta. (IE. not a fully developed product and one that has not been fully tested and signed off yet as suitable for commercial release. Many experienced operators and Beta testers provide useful feedback to the developers of the errors and problems that they discover so that important changes can be made and the product made suitable for commercial release. It is possible to obtain useful functionality from a Beta version, but it is considered very unwise to run such an application on a "mission critical" machine. Putting a BETA on an old expendible machine is a better move and in the event of serious trouble if you have a good disc image the machine can be reformatted and the disc image installed often in less than an hour. Regards paws

Thanks paws, Let me see if I get this right in laymen terms. I now have this on my computer saved (not ran) in my tech downloads folder naturally located in my c drive. No harm yet. I need to use one of the programs you suggested to burn a disk of all files I have on my computer as a back up just in case. And if something does go wrong all the information I have ever saved to my computer, pictures, video, word documents etc can then be put back on safely. Not to mention all the software I have downloaded. Question: I have with my computer a set of 5 or 6 disks I had to burn in case I needed to do a full system restart. I would still need those also right?? Your strongest suggestion however is if I want to do this I should run the cs3 on a computer I really care nothing about since that is the safest way? What would you think the odds are that there would be problems if Adobe is letting people download this now as a trial?

Hi you're welcome,
Have a look at this thread and if you take a close look at posts 14 or so onwards it will give you a good overview of the situation on imaging.

http://forums.tomcoyote.org/Recovery_CD_t7…image&st=15

Just to confirm, if you take correctly, an image of your c drive for example, then in the future if you want to restore your c drive then everything will be restored from that image, everything that was on your c drive, at the date you took the image, will be put back to the state it was in when you took the image.

The analagy I use is it's like an electronic photograph. It will include Windows, your settings, files, data, programmes etc. Its pretty good insurance, I keep my disc images on an external USB hard drive, but there are different types of media you can use.
see the above link for further info.

The System Restore discs provided by your computer manufacturer are completely different, if used they will put your machine back to state it was in when it left the factory so any programmes you have installed, data created, settings configured since then will be lost.

I cannot give you any statistical data on the ratio of troubles folks experience per Beta installation, some folk have no trouble with Betas at all and find them very useful, others have endless troubles and end up formatting and starting again.

My best advice is don't use/test a Beta on a "mission critical" machine, instead use an expendible one that you can format and reinstall quickly and easily if serious trouble strkes.
Regards
paws