System Restore, GoBack, Winternals Recovery Manager... etc

[Radgam]

Hey all,

I have a fantasticly amazingly habit - either through pure bad luck, or general lack of talent (I digress, but I would say my computer skills are very capable these days so I'm opting for 'bad luck') - of accidently ruining my OS installations.

Quick bunch of details: I use nLite to create an OS installation disc (of XP) and integrate the latest patches, etc, then go thorugh the installation. All apps/personal files are on E, everything else is on C, so reinstalling is quick. But to get to the point, it's still a pain having to go through reinstalling so much. Third time this year already, having a bad year.

I've looked at Winternals Recovery manager - it's good, but slightly too complicated for my needs. Way too complicated, in fact. I couldn't ever get it to work on my base workstation, because from what I can tell it's not designed for single workstation installation, more network/multiple system based.

System Restore is okay, but here's an example of where I find it failing

Day 1 - Created recovery point, installed applications
Day 6 - Uninstalled an application
Day 7 - Screwed up system, decided to revert to day 1

Well, it partially worked, but it left me with a few missing files and inability to unstall the application I did on Day 6 because those files were removed on day 7 and not all of them were brought back on the day 1 image.

Lastly, tried Norton GoBack. Interesting program, but I see a lack of options which is somewhat painful. I want to exclude certain directories from being backed up, but I can't. Irritating.

Are there any other products, more advanced than GoBack but not the level of Winternals, that do a similar job to System Restore only more efficiently? If not... what would you suggest?

I know I could create system images every day and such, but as all my personal files are on E as well, that creates another whole problem. Why create an image of 100GB of data when all I need a backup of is the windows folder, a few files in program files that have changed, and a few files in application data. I don't want to have to lose latest emails in outlook, for example, because I've gone back 7 days in a system restore.

That's what I like about system restore, if I can credit it for anything. I don't lose my updated files, but I can restore the system (okay, I actually have lost a few files when using system restore, which is why I'd further like the ability to exclude a directory from changes being recorded).

I'd love to hear suggestions. I'd really like to up my level of productivity rather than waisting all my time just fixing my computer.

[pam123]

Right click on "C" in My Computer>Properties to see how much space you really have on that partition. The recycle bin, system restore and any other housekeeping functions take up gigs of space, unless you've remembered to re-size them ( not to mention the necessary page file ), and XP gets touchy if it's cramped.
That could explain why just installing-uninstalling one program will crash the whole thing.