how do we prepare ourselves for windows crash?

J

joyceanblue

Disciple
hi friends, this thread i am making is not about solving a current problem but how to prepare for it. I often fear what I would do if my os was to crash and wouldnt let me boot into windows. I used to have UBCD few years ago that came pretty handy when my xp crashed. But I am sure things have moved since then and there are more options but I am not aware of them, I checked the thread about windows recovery disc that is on the same page (for now) and looks like making a recovery disc is a good option. But are there more sophisticated options? There are a few softwares which make the image of your disc for later restoration but I havent had any experience with them.
So here is a question to my fellow geeks, How have you prepared yourself for your OS crash?
 
I have prepared myself for a crash after my Seagate HDD failed on me putting all my data at risk
Following should be kept at hand(I have kept it)

-A 4GB USB drive which is loaded with Ubuntu, to live boot
-A other pen drive which contains critical apps in such time like TestDisk, partition manager, EasyBCD
-Its also a good habit to download important drivers of LAN and chipset beforhand so you dont have to search for CDs
-Whenever I install a program which does any system changes/shell changes(ie Windows Themer etc) I make a restore point
 
I just use Backup and Restore. All you need is a place to back up to (second hard drive or network location) and it does the rest automatically. In case anything goes wrong all you need to do is restore the system image.
 
I keep 2 pillows, a blanket, few cans of peas, soup, beans, hard breads, and cheeses, along with bulk packages of potato and banana chips. The downside of all this is since Windows crashes so often, I have gained weight due to cheese and chips, and no longer like soup, beans or peas. I, however, have become fond of Zzzz...
 
Use a Disk Cloning program. I use Clonezilla (free/opensource) to clone an image of my hard disk. If my computer crashes I just restore the image and I get back ALL my data including installed software's, updates etc. Its kind of like system restore. Norton Ghost does the same thing but it cost$$ you money. Just take regular clones of your hard disk and burn it to a DVD or store it in an external HDD. It takes me less than 2 hours to create an image and restore the image back to my computer.
 
GrimReaper said:
Use a Disk Cloning program. I use Clonezilla (free/opensource) to clone an image of my hard disk. If my computer crashes I just restore the image and I get back ALL my data including installed software's, updates etc. Its kind of like system restore. Norton Ghost does the same thing but it cost$$ you money. Just take regular clones of your hard disk and burn it to a DVD or store it in an external HDD. It takes me less than 2 hours to create an image and restore the image back to my computer.
Click to expand...
does it back it up on a pen drive?
 
Linux Live CD
or a small Ubuntu linux installed for emergencies.


Also I keep my data mirrored on a Portable HDD + important stuff (pics + docs) backed up on the cloud :)
 
If there's enough space any storage media would do. It creates a clone image file, which you can copy to anywhere. space is the only constraint.
 
I do Daily Differential backups of my system & save it on my storage cum media server. Its fully automated, I start my computer in the morning around 9 am, My computer sends a wakeup packet to the server at 10 am, the backup starts at 10:15, the server is configured to turn off at 11 am.
 
If you have some very important data and if you can afford it sign up with cloud backup provider like crashplan. It will help you if something goes wrong with your hard disk and your backup disc.
 
i created a recovery file (image) after installing win 7 into an external hdd. I can't see the file but around 30 gb space was consumed. Now how can i see the file. I want to delete it as i had upgrade to win 8 and want to take a recovery image of it.. please suggest.
 
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