*beg* Ideas as to how to bakc this up please?

Hey all.. I have /somewhat/ of a problem.

I want to sell my current rig. But that involves 1. backing up and 2. deleting about 120x2 GB of data (200 gb total really). So fine, I'm going to be getting 2x 200 GB Sata drive sin my new system hopefully... BUT I have no idea how I'm going to transfer my old data to my new!

I can't sell my current rig until my data is safe and sound . How does one suggest I go about this... I'm going to have to get an SATA RAID card anyhow, since the k7d master has no onboard SATA + raid support, so could I just 1. buy the SATA RAID card and one of the hard drives now, have it sent to me, install it in a pci slot, hook up my current drives to my mobo via ide, and have windows detect both the SATA drives, and the IDE drives and transfer the files from the IDE to the sata drives?

That'd be nifty. UNless someone can suggest a dual socket A board with good overclocking features with onboard LAn under $250. That'd also be nifty.

Anyhow, tell me if this is feasible please. Thanks folks,

-Excelsior

How much data do you actually have to back up?

I'm assuming you can get rid of all the fluff i.e OS, Drivers, Office 2003 etc..
Why don't you try a good ol' DVD backup?

Super Nade said:

How much data do you actually have to back up?

I'm assuming you can get rid of all the fluff i.e OS, Drivers, Office 2003 etc..
Why don't you try a good ol' DVD backup?

Click to expand...

Pretty much only 20 or 30 gb of that is fluff

I'm going to bprobably be backing up 170 GB of stuff, I don't wanna tkae the time to dvd all that

Go buy Norton Ghost. It will make an ISO + bootable image of your entire HDD to CD (or to another HDD). Its what we used at school with the IT guys

I recommend backup everything up to DVDR so when you get your new system you can do a CLEAN install instead of ghost image.

With the data on DVDR you will always have it and can install whatever you want from them.

As for the HD. Download Eraser which is free and overwrite your HD with zeros a few times and you're good to go.

Get another hardrive, buy a USB hardrive enclosure(about $35 for a bytec at newegg), and do what Sentenial said.

Yep as Sen said. Norton Ghost ensures that you have an exact replica of your data. Then your data transfer scheme caould be used to transfer the image with minimum fuss. I would make DVD's of my super important data though.

Good Luck!

What kind of drives do you have now and what kind of system are you going to?

If you have SATA now and you're going to a system without SATA, it doesn't seem like a upgrade to me but that's another story.

If you have PATA drives you should be able to set up your new SATA RAID array then hook your current drives up to the PATA connectors and transfer it over.

I'm not to sure about your situation.

if you make a ghost image, whatever spyware or adware you have on your current system will also transfer to your new one... I suggest a clean install.

Not necessarily, if you use ghost to create the image, you can inspect the resulting gho (iso) files with ghost explore, and by right clicking on any file or folder you can restore it anywhere you like into a current file system or install.

Creating a ghost image does not mean you need to drop the image overtop a hard drive, you can just pull out what you want.

We do this at work all the time - create a ghost image to make certain no valuable company data is lost, then drop a fresh XP image on the machine, install apps fresh, then restore as many data directories and files as possible. In our situation, after a few days the ghost image we stored on the server can be deleted because it will have been included in a tape backup which can be reverted to if the user ever comes across something they forgot to restore from the backup.

There is also a built in ntbackup utility that may help in doing something similar without expending any resources in obtaining Ghost. Not sure on the exact operations of this, but nikhsub is I believe. I plan to look into it but just haven't yet - it is documented in MSKB though.

I would recommend the simplest solution however - so long as you have a very standardized organization to your file system. All files must be stored in my documents or other data directories. If you might miss save games or other data which is stored in application directories or elsewhere, then you should just go with ghost as this will pre-empt any sort of problem like that. So if you are standardized and confident that you are not a dolt, then you should just install the PCI sata card and move over your data as is directly from your existing drives to the new drive.

ohh i didnt know you can pull whatever you want from the image... i thought the whole thing gets installed.... thats nice to know.

Ya, there are basically two sides to ghost that I am familiar with, the windows side where you can use ghost explorer to pull out whatever you want, and the non-windows side where you can create and install images.

I.M.O.G. said:

Ya, there are basically two sides to ghost that I am familiar with, the windows side where you can use ghost explorer to pull out whatever you want, and the non-windows side where you can create and install images.

Click to expand...

Correct typically however most people just do a ISO of the HDD and arent picky.

Sentential said:

Correct typically however most people just do a ISO of the HDD and arent picky.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "do an ISO", like whether you mean install the image, or create the image - anytime you work with ghost you are working with an ISO... But I would say that most commonly people create a fresh install image, including fresh install of windows, some/all applications freshly installed, all tweaks, fresh defrag, then image to have a baseline image to revert to instead of doing a fresh windows install and having to go through all of that again. When they aren't substitutuing a reimage for a reinstall, I think people typically store the ISO's they create and do not actually install them - so that they can pull out whatever they need whenever they want.