Caution: Check whether your BIOS supports the booting of CDs!
If the partitions are preceded by warning signs this means that the current file system is in use at the moment. This means opened files are on the drive the contents of which are not known at this point in time. For example the reason for a file system being in use might simply be active programs or an operating system started by this partition.
Now Choose Dialog appears and can be used to select the type of hard disk backup to be created. In the upper part it is possible to select the hard disk partition to be backed up. Under this is the list of the partitions found on this drive. This list also contains an item for use in backing up all partitions of the hard disk.
Strictly speaking it is not possible to read an active file system because the data might change during reading (and will probably do so). There is the risk of data loss if active file systems are to be backed up. Ahead Software therefore urgently advises you not to back up file systems for security reasons!
Nero does, however, allow you to back up files systems which are in use since most PCs are probably configured in such a way that only one single large partition is located on the active operating system on the hard disk. Such hard disks might otherwise not be backed up at all.
After selecting the data to be backed up you may quit the dialog by clicking on OK. Sometimes a warning appears indicating that perhaps some file systems cannot be restored onto other disks. This notice appears if one of the file systems to be backed up cannot be adapted by Nero to other hard disk sizes and/or other partition startup addresses. Currently Nero supports the file systems FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, Linux Ext2fs and HPFS. If you have set up a NetWare file system, for example, this cannot be adapted by Nero to another hard disk size. As we have explained this is only possible with the file systems mentioned above.
To sum up: it is always possible to back up and restore hard disk backups (i.e. for all file systems) without any difficulty if the data is being played back on the same disk or one of a similar structure to the one on which it was backed up. Playing back onto another disk might be a problem if the backup includes a file system not supported by Nero. The same applies to restoring hard disk partitions if they are to be written to another place on the same disk or to another hard disk model. In this instance the Nero restore program will refuse to restore such a backup!
Currently Nero will still not support data compression nor any procedure to exclusively back up used sectors. To Nero a partition is just a quantity of hard disk sectors at the moment. That is why the quantity of CDs needed to back up a large hard disk may be considerable. However this can be tolerated in view of the low price of CD-Rs. Compression and exclusive burning of used sectors will be implemented at the earliest opportunity.
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