Since loosing a hard drive with lots of my poser stuff on that wasnt backed up Ive been a bit paranoid about backing up, so today I bought myself a usb 3.0 3TB external hard drive to back up all my poser stuff . I have transfered all the install files of everything (comes to quite a bit) but was wondering if I copy the entire contents of the smith micro folder on to this drive which includes poser 2010 and poser 2012 ( poswer 2012 is linked to the runtime of poser 2010 so I can access everything i had in poser 2010 and just add new stuff to 2012) in the event of disaster cvould I just copy eveything back and it would work I dont know maybe I would need some back up of the registry as well any one know? last time it took me months to get everything back by reinstalling , if it happens again I would like to be prepared

I am not positive that just copying all the contents of the Smith Micro 2010 and 2012 will work. It may; I just don't know.

But by copying the tree with your Runtimes you will save many hours of work.

In the future, there is an easier way you might look in to which is called "ghosting" your hard drive. This makes a copy of it in its entirety, and also has the advantage of effectively performing a defrag on the new disk you create.

Here is a link from ehow that tells you how to do it:

http://www.ehow.com/how_4450506_ghost-hard-drive.html

Note that much of the discussion talks about making ISO files onto optical Cds or DVD that you can restore, which in the past assumes you don't have a hard drive. But if you're ghosting a hard drive, even through usb, you're beyond that.

And a link from Wikipedia about the history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_%28software%29

When you ghost a new drive from scratch you should be able to use it in your computer as if it is the original disk. You can ghost to larger disks, and the system will typically still work.   There are some details that have to be correct, the Master/Slave jumper setting, whether your partition is active or not, but if you get into it the software should tell you.  You should also be able to ghost IDE to Sata. It works fine for data, at least, and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work for an operating system disk.

So, I would look at ghosting your disk and then setting the ghosted version aside as a master back-up. If your working disk fails, you could ghost it back to the same point as which you started.

Note: I would also look at registry back-up programs such as "erunt". This is supposed to work from Windows XP thru Windows7. Sometimes getting a disk to work is just a matter of retoring your registry to a previous point in time. Typically they say that if you use these kinds of programs they are effective if you run them immediately before you install new software. That way if you install something that does something unexpected, you can get back to where you were.

so probably for what iwant to do just copy the runtimes and then if i ever need to get everything back reinstall poser and then copy the runtimes back from the back up

copy the folder and back up the registry section with the application info. For Poser up to P7 its only some file associations and the location of the Poser.exe file and folder.

on my system thats HKCU/software/efrontier      (HKEY_Current User)

Quote - copy the folder and back up the registry section with the application info. For Poser up to P7 its only some file associations and the location of the Poser.exe file and folder.

 

on my system thats HKCU/software/efrontier      (HKEY_Current User)

 

Sounds good. The only thing you may have to do if that doesn't work is then go into your new Poser and one by one tell it where the individual runtimes are supposed to be. This is something you did if you originally created separate Runtimes.