MS 98 Backup catalogs #2

I regularly back up my data to CD. It can happen that
Backup Catalogs may be overwritten, corrupt or otherwise
non-relevant to the backed-up files.

In older Windows, one could easily Rebuild catalogs from
these files and then Restore in the normal way.

I don't see any way to do this in Win98 SE Backup, - nor
any other method to Restore files without the original
catalog for them.

Is there any way to do this?

Thanks.

 

Abby_sale

If your really serious about backing up your computer, you need to look at a commerical product. The WIN98Se backup software works ok but if you have a major failure ie: Harddisk died, then you will be hard pressed to restore everything in its original manor with the WIN Backup software. Look at DriveImage, Ghost or any of the major backup software. All of them work with most windows operating systems. THey are a lot quicker to use, they burn cd's and will provide you with a reaonable sense of security that during a disaster, you can restore and recover.

Storage_man

 

Quote: I'm sure you're right over-all. My understanding is that I'd need a (nearly) equal storage space to my present HD to image like that. I've seen several posts that a full b-u to CD is lengthy. Say, 18 CDs in my case and expensive if they're R or dangerous if they're RW. End of Quote

Drive Image and True Image backup a typical W98(or SE) or W2K boot drive to about 480 MB. A True Image image is the smaller of the two images produced. Both fit on a single CD. Ghost images are about 50 to 100 MB larger than DI or TI images. True Image is the fastest imaging software to date and produces the smallest image, but the preliminary reports on Ghost 9 speed are about the same as DI and TI. Ghost 9 will have the burden that DI 7 had in that it requires .Net installed and taking up ~70 MB of the boot drive. The sizes of the images given assume that your swap (W98) or page (W2K) file is on another drive or in another partition.

 

I omitted mentioning that, if you like the MS 98 backup, the commercial version is Stomp's Backup My PC. It allows recovery if there is a hard disk failure witha set of recovery floppys. Compression is modest for the boot drive.

If you decide to get Acronis True Image it has been offered on eBay as an outright purchase for $39. This number is for version 7. I haven't checked lately to see if they are listing version 8.

 

Abby_Sale

As far as storage space goes, all of the comercial products have some sort of compression. Some also provide variations of compressions ie: Fast with lower compression or Slow with Higher compression. High compression even on the system volume should get you 2:1. So if you have 5gb, you should be able to save it on around 2.5gb,

Storage_man