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

In this episode of MindPower, Bryce explains gives simple instructions for how to back up and restore your hard disc using a freeware program called PING.

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http://www.ahearttowitness.com/software.php#disk

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Theme Music: "Soulplug" by KillaHertz
Used with permission by way of Creative Commons
http://www.audiofarm.org/audiofiles/637-killahertz-soulplug

Background Music: "Low Flight" by Stereofloat
Used with permission by way of Creative Commons
http://www.audiofarm.org/audiofiles/73-stereofloat-low-flight

This video by Bryce L. Tomlinson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at www.ahearttowitness.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.ahearttowitness.com/creativecommons.php

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[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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.