On Restore Partition Labels Out of Order. How to Stop This?

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Eric
Posts: 224
Joined: Mon Sep 05, 2011 6:53 pm
Location: France

Re: On Restore Partition Labels Out of Order. How to Stop Th

Post by Eric »

Just after restore, and before booting, you can also reassigned the letters to the drives with the SetWinDl.tbs script.
Radish
Posts: 29
Joined: Sun May 10, 2015 7:42 pm

Re: On Restore Partition Labels Out of Order. How to Stop Th

Post by Radish »

Brian K wrote:
> How do you backup the non OS partitions? Which software?
>
> Have you considered using Entire Drive image backups instead of keeping a
> clone of your primary drive? You could backup more frequently (to an
> external drive) than what you are doing at present. If HD1 fails then swap
> it out for a new blank HD and restore the image. There will be no drive
> letter issues.

I used to do non-OS partition backups manually - which was a bit of a pain. Now I use 'file syncing' to backup my non-OS partitions. It usually does it within minutes, sometimes seconds, for each partition as (after the first ever backup using it) it only copies over new or changed files, and will delete, or 'archive', files that I've deleted from my day-to-day working HD, at least with the settings I use for it. In this way the content of the backups folders always match ('mirrors') my day-to-day working HD contents. I prefer doing it this way as there is no software lock-in as far as getting at the files goes in an emergency. I also use wxChecksums (great little program, sadly no longer in development) for creating MD5 checksum files for the non-OS partition content backups. In this way I can check file integrity of the backups quickly - so I know the backup went fine. If I have any very critical new files that I outright can't afford to lose, which is rare, then I backup the same day that file is created. However, in general, at the end of each month I end up with three backups of my non-OS partitions (which would included TeraByte image files), two on USB HDs, and one on an internal HD. (In addition to that I burn my OS Base Install image files to two DVDs and have two IFL boot CDs burned as well.) For my Documents partition I also back that up to a flash drive and have copies of it burned to two DVDs. In addition I have copies of utterly critical files sitting as email attachments in emails to myself in two email accounts. It's a system of backups I've used for quite some time - it works for me, no need to change it.

The problem, as I see things, with using IFL/IFW for backing up non-OS partitions is that I'd be writing GBs of data on each and every backup. In addition I create a software lock-in for getting at the backed up files - I really don't want to do that. That said, as you allude to, doing a full HD backup using IFW/IFL if I was moving over to a new HD does seem like a sound idea. But if I was doing this because I knew my day-to-day HD was starting to fail would I want to risk 'backing up' and subsequently restoring potentially corrupted files? My system of doing things doesn't get round this prospect entirely but does mitigate it by a reasonable margin. By my system I know that all my older files aren't corrupt - because they aren't being continually backed up from the day-to-day working drive - that's a real problem in backing up everything each and ever time a backup is done. Fair enough, you could use IFW/IFL to only backup changes to the HD but then you're introducing potentially long 'chains' of .tbi files with the prospect of two things happening. (1) For whatever reason, part of the chain fails. (2) You are still introducing a software lock-in at getting at your backed up files. Seems there is always a risk in using any system of backups but I think it's best to keep them to a minimum.

All that said, for what I do use IFW/IFL for, I think it's a superb program worth its weight in gold. Over the years it has saved me weeks of hard work configuring my OS system, on a fresh install of the system, the way I like it configured. To get back to a fully configured Base Install of my OS only takes about fifteen minutes with IFW/IFL. Brilliant!

I just have this niggling, but not disastrous, issue with non-OS partition/drive labels being assigned in an order I don't want them if I use an image of C: HD1 to restore to C: HD2. If there is a straightforward solution for my tech level to that - brilliant. If there isn't - fine. As I said, on this issue, I might just have unrealistic expectations on what IFW/IFL can and can't do.
Radish
Posts: 29
Joined: Sun May 10, 2015 7:42 pm

Re: On Restore Partition Labels Out of Order. How to Stop Th

Post by Radish »

Eric wrote:
> Just after restore, and before booting, you can also reassigned the letters
> to the drives with the SetWinDl.tbs script.

Thanks for the info. Seems techy to me and I'm not really a tech person. If I'm stuck with the situation I describe then I'd just go down the do it manually on first boot up route. It's not a serious issue, just a niggle.
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