Rescue and Recovery or ?

Any suggestions or preferences on using R&R or 3rd party software to backup your HD?

 

R&R is fine, I also like Norton Ghost or Acronis true image http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

 

Acronis is my fav.

 

Is Norton Ghost or Arconis that much better than R&R that they are worth paying for when you already have a free backup solution?

Also if my thinkpad gets stolen, will I be able to restore the back up on a non thinkpad computer?

Cheers
Jeremy

 

Anyone still curious should see the following thread:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=47925

The general gist is that R&R works fine if you are a single PC user and you will only be backing up your own Lenovo/IBM machine. Any IT department would use Acronis True Image or similar. Ghost is still around but lacks support for Vista. It will work but it is old, old, old.

For the individual user, R&R should be fine for effectively backing and restoring the OS. It is free, it works, and it already has the bootable restore partition that Acronis users talk about.

A lot of people complain about R&R hogging HD space. I suspect that in most cases, backup scheduling was enabled in R&R, and so was creating more backups than those desired.

I am using R&R for my new X61 but I have not yet tried a restore. (Will edit if I do). However, several users on the aforementioned thread state that it has worked fine for them. I would recommend a throrough exploration of the software before choosing a backup strategy.
If there are issues, Lenovo supplies administrative tools to access and edit the R&R backupes. Functionality is limited and complicated but they will serve technically experienced people.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-63827

Naturally, all documents should be backed up seperately on a regular basis, rather than relying on R&R to reserve huge amounts of space just for a few modified word documents. R&R is for backuping the complete system, not day-to-day word documents and spreadsheets.

 

If I understand you, you're saying Rescue and Recovery is a an inefficient way to perform scheduled incremental backups.

I have to say that the online manual for it is so opaque that I wouldn't trust the program for anything but a basic system backup and recovery because I wouldn't know what it was doing.

It might be worth amplifying this discussion to get at what software people might suggest for daily backups of changes to data.

 

I found that Paragon Drive Backup Personal worked best on this laptop.

You really should trial, doing both a backup and a restore, before you buy to ensure that whatever you choose to use will actually function the way you want it to work.

 

I've always believed that for personal use backing up data only is sufficient. Ghosting/imaging a drive is great if you are going back to the same hardware. If your laptop is stolen, trying to restore your tax return or photos to your desktop becomes a nightmare.
I'm sending my kid off to college 250 miles away with a Thinkpad. We'll do a nightly sync back home to my ftp server. If her laptop is stolen or inoperable, she can get the stuff back easily. For software I'll be using SyncBack from 2brightsparks.com. As long as the laptop is on overnight the folders will resync.
Finally, on a flash drive I'll put on a portable version of FileZilla that she can plug into a library computer or a friends machine and get access to everything if her laptop is out of commission.

 

Have a look here for a list of all image-based backup programs (free & paid).

 

I do both. I back up the user data independent of the backup of the entire drive. In this way I can recover a file, an application, or a system. Since most systems these days do not come with a real OS install CD\DVD it can be a real PITA to get your system back without a full backup. I also keep a spare harddrive around.

 

The fact that it is not possible to restore R&R backups to other computers makes it clear that it is not an efficient backup solution for documents. It is, as it is called, apt for recovering or restoring the operating system should it become corrupted or if you change the hard disk.

I have just completed three network drive restores to test the program and to restore some OEM files from the factory installation. I had reshared a network directory with the same name as the new one containing the old RRBackups folder and restored 32bit Vista. All worked fine, but it took a few hours to perform through a 100mb Ethernet.
I then restored 64bit installation by changing RRBackups share again to reflect the newer backup. This worked OK overnight. However, it left a couple of traces of the previous installation behind, i.e. it did not reformat the C: partition and left a few files in the program folders (System Update files) and in C:\SWShare. There were probably a few more files and folders left around.
To get a clean install from backup I formatted the c: partition and then restored again.
(I had a few bootup issues due to having stupidly formatted with BartPE XP from the command prompt. This should have been done from either the Vista Recovery Environment or from Windows Vista PE from the AIK. I solved theses issues with bootsect.exe and bootrec.exe from Vista RE.)

By formatting the target partition beforehand to avoid post-restore conflicts the process takes far less time (about 70 min, local restores are quick) to restore over the network as it must not have to be checking existing files to see if they should be overwritten. This seems obvious perhaps, but I could find no information in the R&R help regards whether the restore function cleans the partition beforehand and I had presumed it would from the way it was worded.

So, it seems that the process works fine but if you wish to do a clean restore (a la Ghost) one must format the target partition beforehand. However, as the R&R software does not provide this feature you will need the Vista installation media or PE to do this.

I am sure that professional software like Acronis or Ghost work will work more smoothly. The former will allow you to restore files to a separate computer. R&R does allow you to restore individual files but not to a different computer.
If you have Acronis then a clean install wiping the recovery partition (after having made recovery CD + DVD) is not a bad idea. Acronis can be installed after and can create its own service partion (as long as R&R is gone). However, that means splashing out more money.
A cheap alternative is to continue with R&R and backup daily documents by another method such as Vista file backup or 3rd party software.