,A quickie overview or theory @ what I am driving at:
We have a freeware solution for backing up windows from within windows witha program called DriveImage XML, I think it memory serves me right I have written a basic tutorial on it. However one thing I liked about the commercial version of DriveImage was its capability of being able to back up a full system from within DOS mode.
Recipe or component proposal?
1) A while back Jaclaz helped well more like carried me through a useful method of taking a floppy image that would boot directly into ram, it was very quick & neat. Also it allowed me to put Jo.sys on the front end which permitted an optional feature to boot from a CD created via floppy emulation.
2) Of all the freeware backup programs I think that Partition saving is particularly good, it offers a dos gui is fairly easy to use & allows backups of Ntfs drives! However, one limitation because Partition saving needs a dos Boot disk to load (e.g. from external to Windows) it needs a further util to permit Dos to mount an Ntfs drive. I think Partition saving has a further restriction in that it can only save backup files up to a maximum of 2Gb whilst in dos, ntfs does not have these restrictions.
3) So to address this issue Datapol have a freeware util called ntfs4dos which permits dos to mount ntfs drives so if a user had all ntfs drives backups could still be made.
4) Add a useful help file to help users in it's useage & maybe it could be a viable optional FREEWARE backup solution.
5) Also with further freeware utils loaded from a front end menu like COPYR.DMA which back ups hdds with bad sectors, also a freeware MBR backup util thrown in it could be a useful bit of kit.
It could be distributed in an image file, it would be very fast as it would load into ram curtesey of Grub4Dos. Do you think this recipe would work, would be beneficial or is there anything that would scupper this idea?
Feedback would be appreciated?
Regards & Best Wishes,
ispy
