How do you backup your system?

I try to keep the amount of information needed to a minimum.

Everything fits on a RAM key.

Keep the machine ultra clean too.

--Cheers

 

Yeah!
Forget about those things as a BACKUP medium. They are about as un-reliable as good old floppy disks. (I'm at my 4-th stick this year .)
Google around a bit, you'll find out quickly.
Pretty handy for quick transfers, PROVIDED YOU ALWAYS have taken independent serious backup measures.
nononsense

 

Yesterday i discovered something that might perhaps be useful to others.

I did a disk defragmentation and noticed that, as usual, the files were not fragmented anymore but they were spread all over the disk. As I read somewhere that the transfer data speed decreases while you go further away from the beginning of the disk I thought it would be good to move all the file to the front of the disk. But I didn’t know how to do this.
I discovered yesterday by accident that if you put a disc image back to a disk, all the files are moved to the front of the disk without any gaps between the files.
So by making an image and immediately restoring the image you can clean up your disk.
Apparently even the system files are moved. I didn't now this was possible.

And Yes the system is still running.

 

>>So by making an image and immediately restoring the image you can clean up your disk.
>>

Is it not faster running directly a defragmentation with Diskeeper?

 

What imaging software are you using?

 

I tried Diskeeper but saw no increase in the data transfer rate.

On top of that i have to buy Diskeepr because i used the trial version.

 

I use Acronis.

 

Acronis True Image is excellent backup software, can be used to make a backup of the full disk to a network shared drive while the OS is running. It also lets you mount the created image as a virtual drive, browse the directory structure and selectively restore files if you need to (instead of a full image restore)

I thought that Diskeeper by default attemped to cluster the files towards the beginning of the disk by virtue of its attempt to create as much contiguous free space as possible towards the end. I know it can relocate system files if you let it do its boot time defragmentation.

Surprised that an image restore would move any files, by definition an image restore doesnt work at the file level, just treats the disk (or partition) as a single entity.

 

I added a screenshot from my PC. As you can see everything was moved to the beginning of D. Before i restored D the files were spread over the disk, included the systemfiles.

 

Wow, that is nice and clean.

I believed you by the way (before the screenshot), I'm just surprised that it would work that way when doing an image backup/restore.