marmite

Cool - sounds good. Now you have me worried that I'm doing Reflect a disservice - hope not 'cos I'm a huge fan! In all seriousness I don't think so though - I've been through it a few times though and I can't see a disk-to-disk clone operation. LOL ... interesting concept Yep; ignoring cloning for a moment that's your (well 'my' anyway!) standard system failure recovery option.

Mr Don do you have stakes in Handy Recovery? Seems like almost every post of yours that I've read today mentions it So while we're on the subject, are there any functional limitations in the trial version? Correct me if I'm wrong but I can't find a freeware version; and if that's the case I think it's fair that you should mention that. This product is just one of many paid-for programs that might do what the OP wants.

AFAIK this doesn't apply to the temporary internet cache, which is what the OP is referring to. It appears to be the location for the Windows 7 cache. Anyone else had internet cache clearing problems at W7? @ KokoCanada - exactly what file do you think are not getting cleared? If it's just index.dat files (and of course the folders that they sit under) then these files cannot be removed until reboot (unless the behaviour is different at W7 but I suspect not).

Using Macrium? No - though you cannot backup onto a partition which is itself part of the backup. So (free space permitting) you can back up C onto D, or D onto C. But not D onto D or C&D onto D. You should be able to split the backup across multiple CD/DVDs ... did you limit the file size with the Advanced Settings ... or did it not get far enough to give you the chance to do that?

Thanks I've just loaded Reflect on this machine to make sure what I've said is correct. Most disk back-up programs (including Acronis and Reflect) can create compressed archive images. This is the type I would normally do on my own partitions ... you want it to take up as little space as possible. It appears that Reflect does do an exact clone of a partition or partitions, which means that it will do a sector by sector clone of the whole disk ... but it does still create this as an image file as mentioned earlier. So that still leaves the situation where that image file needs to be 'restored' onto the new drive. Dunno if Acronis can clone the disk directly? I guess one thing to watch is terminology. Direct cloning of a disk is probably straightforward. But I have used the term image file when perhaps a more accurate term is archive file. Other people might use image to mean the same as clone. As long as you're aware of the difference between actually cloning the disk (or partitions) to another disk, and creating an archive/image file of that disk (or partitions), you should be okay

I take partition copies as a matter of course; I'd just make sure I did one before migration. But I couldn't just create that image on the new drive; an image isn't the same as a copy - you couldn't boot from it for example. An image is just a file that contains a copy of a partition or partitions. But it is a file in proprietary format file from which those partitions have to be extracted using software that can read that format. It's not an exact copy of the raw disk, in the same way that a zip file isn't an exact copy of the files it contains. Disk cloning software does an exact byte for byte copy of one disk onto another; hence the target disk has to be at least as big as the source disk. So you may be able to successfully restore the image into the new partition, but you have to create the image separately first anyway, if you see what I mean. Having backed up the system as normal, the easiest step has to be just to clone that disk.

Just to confirm, my suggestion is not to use Reflect for the actual disk migration. Use a disk copy/clone program to do the migration. I've gone back and edited my earlier posts to try and make that a bit clearer. I would use Reflect to back up the partitions on the old drive so that they could be used to restore the system in the event of a problem with the migration. But any such problem is more likely to just require starting the process again; since it's unlikely the original drive would be affected.

Note though, these are disk / file back up programs, not disk cloning programs But as back-up programs, having tried all of them, I'd still go with Reflect. I haven't used Drive Image recently, but Acronis has lots of funky buttons and is perhaps more user-friendly. I prefer Reflect's clean interface, its versatility and perhaps slightly more technical options.

Erm, well glad it's all working

I have Reflect on another machine, but not on this netbook. But I'm pretty sure from looking at the Macrium site that it works as I believe; it's a back-up utility and does not have any disk copy functionality. Hence the need to use an intermediate image if you were going down that route. To answer your question, if the new drive is partitioned, you could use Reflect partition images (or those from many back-up programs) and restore them on a partition-by-partition basis. So theoretically, depending on how your partitions are configured, you could back up partitions and restore them onto your new drive without using additional media. But it is much easier to use a disk copy program! Edited to add: Perhaps my original post should have said "I'd certainly use Macrium Reflect to back up drive contents or partitions" since it works on a partition basis. But that was a bit of a throwaway anyway; as I say I think the preferable route is to clone the disk, not to migrate via an image.

@ kroozer- Ahhh, gotacha. Sorry - I missed that bit! @ RaceyLady - can you confirm whether your complaint is that when you go to the login page, you expect your login details to be pre-completed?

Okay. Well I'm also using IE8 on XP (Home). My Ccleaner version isn't the latest, but I downloaded the latest portable version and ran that under a different user. That successfully retained this forum's cookie.

This should be a good way to do your upgrade, yes. [i'd certainly use Macrium Reflect just to back up a drive, but it won't clone a drive directly (as in ... it will only do it via an intermediate image).] Cloning is the easiest way to go. Have a look at this ... http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/. I've never used it ... but it does the cloning part and it's free. I don't know whether it will clone 'on the fly' though ... I'm assuming it must be either done on the fly or from a boot disk. I'm pretty sure other people on here can recommend other products that do the same thing.

Try it When you've logged onto a site (try this forum for starters - there's only one cookie involved - forum.piriform.com). Close all of your open browsers, then go back into IE and visit the forum. If you're still logged in then your browser is retaining the cookie. kroozer - you don't need forms AutoComplete to retain the cookies

Just another vote for Reflect ... excellent software. You can use it for ordinary data backups too.

Yep ... http://www.threatexpert.com/report.aspx?md...f365bfa9ffe4f5f Maybe one of the items in this report is recreating/maintaining the key; unless it's just not being successfully deleted in the fist place. If you are running Daemon Tools Lite and you intend to keep using it then I'd be inclined to ignore it ... as we (should) know, the Reg Cleaner isn't 100% correct all of the time.

Also have a look at davey's post here ... http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showto...st&p=107935

Fix is due out on 12 Jan. In the meantime just go into the Adobe Reader's Edit/Preferences and turn off JavaScript - it's very rarely needed. Avoid them? It's a good format. A lot of stuff that I want or need to read is published in PDF format. I also find it a good way of securing the content of published documents. Yes, the Adobe reader has been heavily targeted by malware but that doesn't devalue the document format. As to 'PDFs being garbage' ... that's a bit of a nonsensical statement!

Yep that's quite often true, so thanks for letting us know Glad your recovery effort seems to be going fairly successfully.

Cool I haven't used RoboCopy myself. And thanks for the link Aethec; I'll check that out for future reference.

Don't use ccleaner ... then you get lots of extra clicks for free

As far as file-wiping goes then yes. However for freespace wiping rumour has it that ccleaner only does one pass of zeros. Unless you want more than that (and there's no reason why you should) then effectively they do the same thing. However Eraser gives you more options for wiping freespace, like once with random data through to the pointless full Gutmann erase. Not sure on the performance angle; I don't use either tool for freespace wiping - just to confuse matters I use Sysinternals' sdelete for that So as far as I know they work as well as each other for my needs. But as my first post said they are just different tools used at different times. For secure deletion they just complement each other. Season's greetings to you too tornado

+1 ... with extra tinsel

Mentioning secure deletion was in the context of talking about 'complete passes', which you had mentioned in your previous post. The number of overwrite passes is often used in the context of secure file deletion. Secure deletion is a way of making a file irretrievable, and it's usually used when you deliberately want to make sure you can't recover a file. But it's not the only way that a file becomes irretrievable. As long as the data gets overwritten by other data then you won't be able to get it back. At the moment you permanently delete a file in Windows (by emptying the Recycle Bin for example) then the data is still there on the drive, but Windows has removed it's pointer to it so as far as you're concerned it's gone. However because that area on the drive hasn't been overwritten yet you should, at that moment in time, be able to get the file back. From that point on though, as far as Windows is concerned that area of the file is 'free space' - there's no file there as far as the OS is concerned. To a large degree it's then pot luck as to whether and when that area of the disk is overwritten. The more disk write activity that takes place the greater the chance that the file will be completely or partially overwritten. As I've mentioned before you can get partially overwritten when, for example, new files are written over that top of deleted ones. Files are different sizes ... so you might get a small file which goes bang in the middle of where your original was, or you may get a huge file that obliterates it completely. Exactly wot kroozer says. The less the drive has been disturbed by disk writes, the greater the chance of recovery. As far as defragging goes, deleted files constitute free space, so as part of the defragging process the places where the deleted files are could be overwritten by the blocks (undeleted files) that the defragger is moving around. So if the drive hasn't been defragged then that's better for your recovery chances.

Well, per the above you don't need a hash to compare content. As long you do a binary compare that will correctly give you a match. A hash is just a checksum based on that binary content. The point I'm making is that the easiest way to 'store' a processed file to compare against others (i.e. without having to read the whole file stream multiple times) is to take a hash of that content ... it's just more efficient. When I say that I suspect most do use a hash, it's not because it's the only way that will work; it just seems a sensible design approach. If there are programs that don't match correctly their logic is just wrong ... hash or no hash