Has anyone gotten their AAO set up just the way they like it -- and did a complete system back up on a bootable USB drive or SD card? Would love to do something like this -- if my netbook crashes, I'd hate to have roll back to factory state and starting all over again... I use Win XP. Pray tell...
Try Norton Ghost or Acronis products. They copy whole content of HDD and can be stored on another HDD/Partition. After crash you can restore your HDD with every single settings as you have now...
Re: Disaster Recovery (Linux Style) I've been using fsarchiver to make a backup of my latest and greatest working image; If I ever need to restore, I boot using any old bootable usb flash drive I happen to have lying around, download and install fsarchiver if necessary, and restore. What I don't have is a bootable image of that partition.
Gentlemen: Thanks for your feedback -- but my system is Win XP -- not Linux. Also, I am really interested in using USB drive instead of external HDD -- to cut down on travel bulk and weight. Anyone who has done the above, I'd sure appreciate your insights. Thanks.
Personally I'd use Acronis True Image. Boot from it's CD media and you can then clone a 100% 1 to 1 copy of your hard drive (that is partitions, their sizes, and all data on them) to an external source. I regularly use this utility when installing a new drive into a computer. But can see it could be invaluable as a backup solution. Acronis True Image also comes with Windows-mode backup solution, but by far the easiest for me is to just use the bootable media. Another great use is that you can use it to thoroughly, securely and permanently erase (zero) a hard drive using a wide variety of zeroing standards (US DoD is my fave).
I have taken a U3 USB drive and written the Acronis boot CD to the CD partition and then written an image to the data partition of the drive. Makes for an all in one restore USB drive. Problem is writing the CD to a U3 USB drive takes some hacking. This site has a step by step on writing the CD (ISO) to U3. http://www.instructables.com/id/Using-U ... 8G-Cruzer/
