Backup Recovery partition in other ways besides DVD?

Is it possible to zip its contents and possibly move them to an external drive or perhaps upload them to a data server as backup?

i don't trust recovery DVDs

 

I agree with you on that. DVD's and CD's have a limited lifetime. Low quality cd or dvd discs for are known to loose read quality and therefore data integrity after 2 years. That's why I use Acronis True Image Home ( www.acronis.com). You can take whole images of all drives and from there on schedule incremental or differential backups. You can use tape or (network-) drive for ex. I personally prefer to use both a dedicated partition (Acronis Zone) on my laptop drive to keep at least 1 whole image and schedule backups to a external usb/firewire drive. Acronis offers also the Disc Director Suite, a nifty tool to better manage partitions (I recommend to create 1 for each workfield: 'App Data' from Outlook, a 'Documents' partition and a 'backup' one)...if there was a malware threat it usually will stay on the same parition. In case of disaster recovery, Acronis can be called through a section during machine boot time Hope this helps.
Note though that your Sony Vaio has a dedicated Backup section which I would keep regardless all the bloatware pre installed and further do take those recovery dvd's on first use..you just never know.

Best regards, Oliver

P.S.: 'Zip' like Winzip or Winrar is as far as I'm concerned not applicable when it comes to Backup operations. Further I'm not aware of compression methods commonly being used upon backup creation..it would be a time consuming process with potential of loosing data in the process. The whole point of a backup is to have high availability and data integrity!

 

i think you can burn the discs and rip the ISO image file and store it somewhere safe.

i am so glad i got fresh start, it saved me lot of time