True Image - Is there anyway ?

[WyteWatt]

You know how when you want to go back to a old image well everytime you do that you lose all the programs and games you installed sense then and have to reinstall them.


Is there anyway possible to make a image of each program or game you install that way it makes it quicker to put back each program and game you had before that you wanted to keep please ?

Something that would work with True Image please?



Mods please move.

 

[tiap]

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly, Trueimage should do what you want. I have been using it since it first came out and still use an older version. They're newer versions have had problems so I stuck with the old.

Let's say you were putting 3 large progs or games on the box. Make an image of the base os with your tweaks etc. and store that, initially on a separate partition. Then install the first prog and image that under a new name. Keep doing this with all your new progs. Sort of like a better system restore. I break up my images into 650mb so that I can also burn them to cd or put multiples on dvd. This way if a new prog trashes your system you can re image from before the install. Works for me

 

[DaveSimmons]

Also, if you have multiple drives and/or use multiple partitions, you can install your games to D:, E:, etc. instead of C:.

That way you can make an image of just C: that will include the OS and the Windows setup information for your game (like registry keys) but will not include all the game maps and fixed data. When you restore the image, the game will work fine (as long as D: or whatever is OK) because its setup information is restored and its data is still there on D:

 

[WyteWatt]

tiap yes but what if a problem happens later down the road that didn't appear before and you want to go back to when you first installed only two programs on your OS but to do that you will lose all the other programs and games you installed after that ?

Then you will have to reload all those other programs and games you installed sense because you have to go back that far. The problem may not appear as soon as you install a program. Sometimes it takes a while to know there is a problem.

Thats why I was curious if there is any program that will image just the program or game you have installed so it makes it a little easier and faster restoring the programs and games you wanted to keep after imaging your main drive to a lot earlier period please?

 

[DaveSimmons]

No. You can make as many different images over time as you want, but there is no way to mix and match pieces of images.

And there are no partial image programs ("image just my HL2 install"), probably because restoring that image isn't really more efficient than just reinstalling the game normally.

 

[tiap]

More often than not, when you install a prog, with a system that is sound to start with, any probs show up fairly quickly, if no critical hardware has been changed.
This is much different than setting changes in a prog which is a user caused problem than can usually be reversed. In such a case, use the prog uninstall first and then windows uninstall and then a registry prog like regcleaner for the traces. Usually fixes a bad prog.
Installing a new prog with old system drivers can create a lot of problems.
Be selective in the progs and hardware you install. Less bloatware the better.
If you have to reimage to a much earlier time it is still the lesser of all the evils. I just finished starting over on my wife's thinkpad, and just putting in winxppro and sp2 with all the updates, trend micro, spybot etc., wifi and ethernet, and ibm driver updates I've got 5 hours into it. And I've got a lot more progs to go. That was with using thinkpads factory refresh and autopatcher. I didn't bother to keep the image updates. Silly me.

You can't have it all, but imaging is by far the best.

 

[nineball9]

You can use the TI "Explore Image" feature to view images in an Explorer interface. You can drag and drop files and/or folders from the image to your active disk(s). This is helpful for restoring saved game data for example. This method will not restore any registry entries the game or app uses however. Obviously, you can only recover that which is backed up in the most recent image, which was your main condern in the first place.

You could use a backup program in addition to TI to backup (and if necessary, restore) individual files and folders. I use TI for images and BackupMyPC for somes file/folder backups. I also drag and drop some files to another drive for temp backup purposes.