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Making Recovery discs for new computer


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I've just purchased an Acer computer with Windows Vista.    Normally in my experience brand new computers fight tooth and nail until you agree to create recovery discs but this one doesn't seem to be bothered,   even though two blank DVD's were included in the box.

Comet offered to do it for me for £15 but I airily dismissed the offer,   thinking I knew best.   Which of course I do because one of you tech savvies will I am sure be able to tell me how.....

Please....?

(Incidentally not a Freesat box to be had in Barnstaple,  or indeed in other towns' outlets in the south west.   They are it seems flying off the shelves)

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Hi Martin,

did the computer not come with any software back up discs at all? I imagine that if the answer is no, then the discs that came with it are for you to burn recovery discs. you should have been prompted to do so when you first switch it on.

See this page

and maybe this one or go to the ACER site and look for your model or give them a call

good luck

Danny

 

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Personally I'd forget recovery CD's or DVD's, all they will do is put you back to 'out of the box', is that what you really want when disaster strikes ?

Invest in a copy of Acronis Drive Image and make regular backups images with it and store them off machine. If the very worst should happen, i.e. a dead HD, once you've replaced it you can be back to exactly where you were when you made the last backup and probably in under an hour.

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This back up thing has always bothered me. I try to keep the operating system on a small 80Gb HDD so it can be replaced easily if anything goes wrong and it is easy to back up. Data is another matter. I have a 500Gb drive for programs and 1Tb SATA drive for data, how on earth do you back those up without having extra drives of similar size?

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Backup is easy if you approach it logically.

The first thing to do is completely forget the backup procedures provided by the various flavours of Windows, it's simply not up to the job, and critically, relies on Windows to recover a backup which is somewhat missing the point [8-)]

My own strategy, which I have followed for several years, is to have 2x additional external HD's, each totally independant of each other, and do my backups manually to one and mirror to the other by automatic synchronisation. I also keep them in FAT32 so they are DOS readable.

My OS drive (still XP, Vista is a waste of both time and money IMO) I can usually manage to keep to a 10gb partition backed up regularly with Acronis. Here small IS beautiful and it also helps concentrate the mind on not loading unneccessary software.

Not questioning what you have or choose to save BTW but 500gb + 1Tb does sound a tad on the excessive side to me [geek]

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[quote user="Jay"]I try to keep the operating system on a small 80Gb HDD so it can be replaced easily if anything goes wrong and it is easy to back up.

[/quote]

Isn't it funny that we now consider a partition of 80Gb to be small.

I remember my first computer at work, ran on two 5.25" floppies, didn't even have a hard disk drive. Better than the 8" ones that came before that...

[geek]

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[quote user="witsinfr"]I remember my first computer at work, ran on two 5.25" floppies, didn't even have a hard disk drive. Better than the 8" ones that came before that...[/quote]You woz lucky, mine had a cassette recorder, 5.25" floppies....I used to dream of them [geek]

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Thanks for these pointers - will follow up.

Whilst I'm not nearly as pro in my backing-up as some of you experts,   I have for years burned stuff to floppy/CD/DVD/external HD and have yet to be caught out by an HDD failure - touch wood.    In fact I still have all the files off my Amstrad 8526, for which a geeky friend designed a sort of printer-emulator that allowed the data to be "printed" direct into an I/O card on my first PC - at the time I had a lot of data on transmitters that would have been awful to retype.   I think it took four or five days to open each file on a crate of floppies (the Amstrad format ones of course) and pretend to print it,  then save it on the PC.

Time for that old joke

What's the difference between a woman and a computer?

A computer will accept three-and-a-half inch floppies.

I'l get me coat......

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[quote user="ErnieY"]

Not questioning what you have or choose to save BTW but 500gb + 1Tb does sound a tad on the excessive side to me [geek]

[/quote]

It may seem excessive to you now but I suspect all new PC's will soon be supplied with 1Tb HDD especially as you can buy them retail now for about £80 (see here). A large hard drive will keep your full DVD and/or music collection without having a bookcase full of disks.

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[quote user="Jay"]A large hard drive will keep your full DVD and/or music collection without having a bookcase full of disks.[/quote]Quite but also makes it a bigger disaster when it dies.

A point to remember - A HD is a mechanical device and will always eventually fail, it's just a question of when.

From over 15 years of experience with HD's of all makes and capacities I personally regard anything beyond 3 years as living on borrowed time [geek]

 

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Returning to the original point,   the Acer e-recovery management asked me to create a password,  but now wants to save a Full Image of over 12 GB.   Clearly not the recovery discs I actually need.

Another option wants me to sign up for Acer E data security management and as there's a licence to sign I aborted as surely you don't need a licence to make your own discs.

I wasn't given an option to make recovery discs during set up so I'm now fairly under-whelmed at Acer's welcome.

Apart from that the computer's great.

Laters - whoops I've found another menu tab which I think is what I want - sorry folks.

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