How to Backup & Restore Your Hard Drive for FREE with PING - PartImage Is Not Ghost

[Whyrendog]

Anybody know how to add USB 3.0 support? Is there a special build or something? On my new laptop, it wont even read a USB 2.0 drive unless it's in a USB 2.0 port. Takes forever to backup/restore now. Old laptop had eSata, was super fast.

[basmagic]

after i maked a image from my windows harddrive. i get the following when backup is complete:

2411 rc.ping %time% - File details stored (and counting)

is this ok? just be patient or does this mean to unmount the cd rom?

thanks in advance

[bfr0d]

He has it all wrong. First of all, you don't need to edit your bios settings and change the boot order. All you need to figure out is which key your bios uses to show the boot menu, it's THERE where you select manually from which source you want to boot. Secondly, basically all systems that are only a few years old allow you to boot from a USB key.

[bfr0d]

Booting from a CD is slow, requires a CD drive (that for example netbooks don't have), the storage capacity is limited (even for a DVD), plus they are big, while a USB key fits your pccket and they get easily damaged. Stick to USB, there are also lots of examples on the net that show how to make a USB key bootable for free. The title of the video is wrong; it doesn't make backups of disks but partitions. Placing that backup on a D: partition, that is on the same drive is also wrong.

[bfr0d]

Even if you store the backup on a 2nd drive, it's still not a backup as you claim it is, because it can still be destroyed by a virus, a hardware failure, fire or can be destroyed by vandalism or removed by theft.

[BroBryce2009]

@bfr0d Thanks for the info. I don't think I left anything out. But I appreciate your input.

[Agnelum1]

well this didn't work for me. first of all i got a gang of errors during the PING initialization, then it wouldn't even recognize my hdd that i was trying to back-up.

up all nite for nothing.

[MindPower009]

@Agnelum1 sounds like maybe you have an older system that might've required a custom filesystem handler to detect a larger capacity hard drive. This is usually done with a BIOS patch on the bootblock of the hard disk. I worked on a system like this once, and PING couldn't read the hard drive. So there are those exceptions sometimes.

[Agnelum1]

@MindPower009 "an older system" in terms of what? hardware? it's an acer extensa 5220 computer with an 80gb hdd. 3 primaries on it - 1 xp (35gb), 1 vista (35g), 1 unformatted (10gb). i was trying to make an image onto an external hdd (160gb) connected via usb2.0

PING would see the "destination" drive but not get my "source" drive. when i swapped the 2 drives around and put my "source" as the external hdd, it still wasn't seen. connected a 2nd external hdd via usb2.0 at the same time & it showed.

[Whyrendog]

@Agnelum1 Usually if you just wait it will fix the errors and boot. There's always errors, then it emulates the hardware or whatever. NEVER read the text lol. Only problem I have had in years and I've done tons of backups on different PCs and laptops for a lot of people is that my newest laptop wont work on USB 3.0. Kind of sucks since I don't have eSATA anymore. But USB 3.0 is faster but it'd be nice if they would add support for the newer ASUS laptop boards. G73JW-XA1 is my laptop.

[Agnelum1]

@Whyrendog thanks for the reply. but the problem seems to be that PING just won't recognize my 80gb disk that i'm trying to make the image of... if i connect other drives through usb, they are detected, if i take the 80gb disk out of the computer and connect it as an external PING still doesn't see it. im at a loss as to why this is.

[1raghavendra1]

Can PING be booted from USB. If yes how (unetbootin?)

[TooNasty1529]

My computer will not boot up regularly or in safe mode i continue to get the blue screen of death. I just watch the video and followed every instruction perfectly. I would like to know if i can reformat my computer and reinstall windows and then upload my programs and documents with the image file i have on my external hard drive that i created using PING?

Need to know ASAP!!!!!

Thank you

[MindPower009]

@kennylex Did you get everything fixed back up?

[kennylex]

@MindPower009

The back up was okay and I could restor the system with Ping, the firt time did a get some size problems with the HD, but after I re-formated my HD with gparted could I without problems restore my full system.

[EACTV]

Can I create the image in the same drive imma back it all up TO?

[BroBryce2009]

@EACTV did you watch the video? The answer is there.

[OrionEd]

I have a question that doesn't seem to be covered anywhere else...

I want to backup all the parts on a disk, in my case a retail store PC with a rescue and restore and a system partition, three in all.

Can I select all of them and have it created three images at once?

Another warning you might want to put out there: PING will restore to the same place it backed up from! You can't take an image of sda1 and restore it to sda2. I learned that the hard way while experimenting a bit.

[iLuis21]

i have one question see i want to make a back up of my c drive wich contains the info of installed programs and games, so what i want to do is just make a copy of the hard drive so if i get a virus or somthing i can just restore from the back up and have all the programs and games setting just every thing back, is this tutorial showing me how to do that or

[MindPower009]

@iLuis21 I think that's pretty much exactly what I showed here. You can also take it a step further and move your "My Documents" and "Desktop" and "Application Data" folders to another drive as well, for instance I have my FireFox and Thunderbird programs set up to store my bookmarks, cache and emails on my E: drive, as well as "My Documents" and "Desktop". This way, when I restore from a backup, I lose NO projects I'm working on or any of my bookmarks and emails.

[water4fuelh20]

Though i have never used PING i am a regular user of partimage for Linux because i run Linux full time. I remember you saying you cannot backup to your primary drive, Ping may or may not let you due this as partimage will as long as you have a separate partition on your c drive.  You did a nice job on giving your platform users a nice alternative using a very powerful yet free program.

[MindPower009]

@water4fuelh20 I don't think I ever said you cannot backup to your primary drive. In fact that's whayt I did in this video. i said you cannot back up a partition onto the same partition.

[water4fuelh20]

@MindPower009, sorry for the miss interpretation . " mind you, you cannot back up your c drive onto your c drive. whatever partition your backing up you have to back it up on some other local drive" I interpreted that as being a separate hard disk. But i do understand that you have made separate partitions on your primary drive and making a image file of your c partition to your backup partition on your primary hard disk. all in all this program for windows like you said is extremely reliable.

[zaputzaput1]

Hi, Bryce. Nice! Can I backup my C drive onto a sata external drive? Thanks

[MindPower009]

Yes, absolutely! I'm using a Seagate FreeAgent drive for my backups, and it works great! Really had to use it recently, so I'm glad I found a backup system I can depend on.

[zaputzaput1]

You made no mention of that and I saw no prompt on the video that gives a choice to backup to external hard drive.

[MindPower009]

At the time this video was made, I didn't have an external drive. If your drive shows up, Ping will detect it, and it simply shows up on the list of possible destination drives.

[zaputzaput1]

Hey, MP, thanks. i really appreciate the tutorial. I'm kind of on the border about it, though, since so many people have screwed up their computers with this program. I may just opt to pay for a premium, although I don't really want to. There are too many things that can go wrong with Ping. Thanks again. Reply?

[MindPower009]

I should point out that there is no backup program that's totally failsafe. I use Ping because I used it in a WIN-WIN scenario and it didn't fail. I also own several premium backup programs, and none of them work any better than Ping, and some of them don't work at all. Just for your information. I would try it on a computer that has a fresh install on it, so you're not losing much, just to try it out, like I did.

[zaputzaput1]

I suppose you're right. I have a bad situation where I bought a computer a few years ago from craigslist, got it delivered and the guy told me he had upgraded it to XP from 2000. The disk he gave me had since gone south and I can't get a disc from Dell because it does not have the original operating system. If I fail, I lose. Tough, right? I just made a rescue disc with Ghost 14 and am hoping it works. I'd really like to try Ping, but too many negative posts about it. Thanks.

[kotter37]

Can you use cd or dvd to store the image.And then make a iso to restore the O/S?

[MindPower009]

You can't restore off the ISO, but you can store the files from the image (usually 1 gig per file) on a DVD for storage. But you have to have them in one place when you restore.

[ORDOVIC]

Will PING back up programs I have downloaded ?

[BroBryce2009]

PING makes a backup of an entire partition. So if your downloaded programs are in that partition, yes it will back them up.

[cowboybeepbop1]

more people should wach your vids

[BroBryce2009]

I agree! :)

[cowboybeepbop1]

@BroBryce2009 well if you agree then mabey you can help me in the production of a tech support website im going to be working on its going to be full of info detailing how to do serten things that follow what a computer can do...

[OldMX]

PING is a great program, it worked where acronis and paragon failed miserably.

[BroBryce2009]

Yeah I have been using PING for about a year now, and it's enabled me to setup a backup system that is much better than I could have done otherwise. I even used it once to clone a laptop onto another same model laptop. Very cool! Make sure you subscribe to MindPower009. I'll be posting all my tutorials here. Thanks for watching!