Disaster Recovery Prep Questions

[martinsan]

I am a new user (less than 1 month) and have just started to use Retrospect Pro 6.0 on my home machine. MS XP (2.2 Ghz), and have a question regarding the preparation of Disaster Recovery's .iso image.

 

 

 

If I point to the I386 folder that resides on the machine I get an .iso image that is approximately 900MB. This was much too large to fit on a CD so I attempted to create the .iso image by pointing to the I386 folder on the XP system CD. This time the .iso image was less than 700MB and thus, would fit on a CD-R.

 

 

 

Question 1: If I copy the entire I386 folder from the XP system CD to the hard drive can I point to the I386 folder (on the hard drive) and get a "normal" .iso image? This would alleviate the need of finding the XP CD each time I would want to create a new disaster recovery CD.

 

 

 

Question 2: How long should the disaster recovery .iso image creation process take. With my 2.2 GHz machine the process took approximately 1 hour. This seems much too long?? Would the time be shortened if I copied the I386 folder as stated in Question 1???

 

 

 

Thank-you in advance for any replies.

 

 

 

Marty

 

 

 

 

[AmyJ]

1) Yes, you could copy the I386 folder to your local machine for easier access, if the CD is not always readily available. However, the only time you need to recreate your DR CD is after a hardware or OS change.

 

 

 

2) Copying the I386 folder to the hard drive will not make a noticable difference in the image creation process, and it is not uncommon for the process to take an hour for creation.

[robertwallace]

That's good to know (that pointing to the CD will give a smaller iso image).

 

Mine was 992 MB; useless for me.

 

 

 

However, the larger (excuse me) question remains unanswered: Why would Retrospect build a disaster recovery image that it should know can't be used? I would expect some warning message somewhere during the process, and suggestion(s) on how to get a usable size.

 

 

 

Robert Wallace