I'm curious.... This is important

[Apostle 83]

We all know that a clean install of an OS can greatly increase the speed of a system (especially on 98). But the hassle of reinstalling everything quite frankly sucks.
I was just wondering if there was a way to backup files so that when you reinstalled an OS, it would have an 'untangled' registry that would allow it to run quickly.

Thanx, all you smart, sexy engineers. (LOL)

[scotter]

if any one has a answer to that let me know to lol /forum/smile.gif

[socalgal]

The best, fastest and easiest way for me is two harddrives on the system and Drive Image.
When everything was fresh on my main drive, I imaged to the second. No separate format needed. I now delete unnecessaries, scandisk, defrag, then backup every (well sometimes every second..) week and if an app or the whole shebang crashes down on me, I can just reimage from the backup. /forum/smile.gif

[Dave_H]

Socalgal,
Your weekly back-ups are not new images are they? (If they were you would end up just like you were a week prior to the crash).

If you did a restore of your original image you would end up with an "untangled" registry just like a clean install. Then you could put in your own data from the normal kind of weekly back-ups. But what about programs that are added or updated since the original image was taken? How do you keep track of all those changes to know what you have to install, re-install, or update, after the restore?

[Glytzhkof]

There are several ways to restore a "clean system".

1: After doing a fresh Win98 install take a copy of "user.dat" and "system.dat" (these contain the windows registry) to a backup folder. When you want to restore the clean system just go to DOS and copy these "clean" registry files over the current files. Note that this will render all 32-bit applications installed after you took the backup useless (they must be installed again).

2: As socalgal says, wse special software to create disk-images (large single files containing the entire hard drive or a partition). The best tools for this are: Norton Ghost and Powerquest Drive Image. Before creating an image make sure you've got an error free disk (run scandisk) which is optimized for maximum performance (defragment it).

3: If you did not create a backup of the registry when you first installed Win98 you can restore a fresh "system.dat" file by replacing the existing one with the hidden system file called System.1st which is located in c:\.

[BBA]

As far as doing a registry "defrag", if you wanted to use that term, the only app I know that will place all registry data in contigous disk space is GHOST from Norton.

I routinely will build a system and then make a ghost image of it then ghost the drive with that image. It usually makes a very noticeable difference in performance.

BBA

[socalgal]

I think I misunderstood the intent of the topic - backing up a FRESH install... apologies!

I backup an exact image of my hdd from "a week earlier". I do not backup if my system is not apparently error free or running well, and I perform the maintenance tasks as I stated before backing up. Of course, I suppose there could be something wrong hidden, but if I experience no problems and everything is running optimally, well.. that's what I do anyway.

As I make frequent updates, etc., this allows me to recreate my optimally running hdd in case of problems. If - when - I start having problems, I'll try scanreg /restore or /fix (among other things) and if things were to get worse, I can just recreate my well-running system from the backup image.

As far as backing up a "fresh install", I have not done this.



[This message has been edited by socalgal (edited 11-14-1999).]