Moving respectfully along.......
Malware? Who has malware in this day and age of Malware enlightenment?
NOT ME!!!!
With the very best Anti-Malware software on the planet, 100% FREE, having any malware at all on ones computer is ridiculous at best.
It's been years, since I had any Virus, Trojan, etc. on my own PC.
And with a reasonable install of protection software, my hundreds of customers stay 100% free of malware too.
When it comes to Malware protection, I can go light or heavy, depending on ones internet habits.
This thread is all about backups, not malware so I won't go into the specific steps I take to stay 100% malware free. Maybe another time.
On doing backups, I would like to say that if one will do some serious HD maintenance before doing their backup, they can reduce the time and MB's that a backup takes.
Using Ghost 2003 to make a backup of my C: drive to my D: drive, for instance takes only about six minutes on my SATA2 HD.
I reduce the size of the files that I back up by almost 4 gigabytes by cleaning up all the junk on my HD, including the old restore points and Pagefile, before actually doing the backup. Just having the backup program on your HD adds files to the backup and is totally redundant.
Backups are better done from a boot disk, than from the hard drive.
I've been doing Ghost 2003 backups on my own system from a floppy disk, for years.
I keep my C: drive clean and in FAT-32 mode (Windows XP) and from my boot floppy, I run a sequence of batch files to remove all the junk files from C: before I do the backup. Finally, my clean backup takes only about six minutes and will even fit on a single DVD, Flash Drive or (of course) a second HD.
Vista requires at least Ghost 11.5, which won't fit on a floppy
,
so I run 11.5 from a bootable Flash Drive or CD. I have both.
If you Prefer Acronis True Image, over Ghost..... No problem!
Both Seagate's Disk Wizard and Maxtor's MaxBlast include the ability to make a backup CD, with Acronis True Image software on it. Both programs are FREE to download.
You just need either a Seagate or Maxtor hard drive somewhere in your system.
Once that CD is made, the parent program can be un-installed from the hard drive, thus decreasing your file load.
Keeping ones C: drive clean, lean and mean, doesn't happen by accident.
A person really has to work at it.
A little side effect of doing my weekly backup with Ghost, is that once the backup is done, I can immediately do a Restore of the Backup Image file and get the worlds greatest Defrag. The result is that my C: drive is perfectly ordered, with NO spaces in the data field and of course, NO fragmentation.
I've managed to teach a few people to do it and they are amazed by the results.
I want to wish everyone of y'alls a very good 2009!
Shadow
