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Main Area and Open Discussion => Living Room => Topic started by: mouser on October 21, 2009, 11:09 PM
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Are you sure that the backup procedure you use will save you when (not if) the time comes that you need it?
I thought I would start a thread about how to test it and make sure it will.
First let's set the ground rules:
- This thread is about whole-system (entire hard drive) backup and restore, not about backing up only your personal documents.
- As I described in my old backup guide (https://www.donationcoder.com/Reviews/Archive/BackUpGuide/index.html), I firmly believe that the best approach involves both periodic whole-system backup combined with more frequent and incremental (preserving multiple versions) personal document backup, but this thread is about testing your full-system recovery procedure.
- This discussion is about *testing* your backup procedure -- not about actually using the software and hardware to do a backup in the first place.
Ok, so let's get started:
Step 1: Make an image of your drive, onto another spare hard drive
- I'm going to assume you already know how to make a backup of your (main) computer hard drive. But you may not -- many (most?) people use a backup procedure that just stores backups of certain important files. If not, for the procedure I'm describing, you are going to need a full Drive Imaging tool, like Acronis True Image, or the nice and free Drive Image XML, or Paragon Drive Image, something similar (see this thread (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=10094.0) or this thread (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=12975.0) for more discussion).
- When you make an image of one drive, that big image file has to be saved to another drive. That's where one of those external usb drives comes in so handy -- so get yourself an external USB drive for storing your backups.
Step 2: Wait you mean there's a step 2??
- Ok now if you're like most people who make a backup of their hard drive, there is no step 2. If the backup program runs successfully you assume that your computer is backed up and that you could restore it if something bad happened.
- But the ugly truth is that many people have had the terrifying experience of experiencing a real hard drive crash and finding that they could not restore their backed up drive image, for a variety of reasons. You don't want to go through this -- trust me.
- The solution of course is to safely test your restoration procedure. [As an aside I will note that some imaging tools like Acronis True Image now has a function that lets you virtually "mount" a drive backup, which can go a long way to validating it and making sure you can access the files -- but it's still no comparison to a real restoration test].
- So how do we simulate the catastrophe of a hard drive crash? Simple, take the working drive out of your PC. There you go, you are now in the same situation you would be in if you had a full hard drive crash. This happens in the real world. Expect it to happen to you one day.
- Drives are dirt cheap these days -- go down to the store or to your favorite internet shop, and buy yourself a spare hard drive.
- Now you're going to put this hard drive into your computer, and you are going to restore from the backed up image onto the new hard drive, which should restore it's state completely.
- What's that? You didn't create a standalone bootable cd for your drive imaging software, and so now you don't know how you are going to restore the backup? That's why you're testing this restoration procedure, so you learn all of these things you have to do.
- Figure out whatever steps you need to take to get the new hard drive restored with your backup image. Boot with it, make sure everything works and all the files are there.
- Once you verify it works, you can remove that drive and put it someplace safe, and put back your original (or put your original on the shelf and use this one). Congratulations, you have now tested your emergency restoration procedure.
Step 3: Improving your system
There are several things you can do to make it a little easier to test your emergency procedures.
- One is to install a hard drive rack inside your computer, which will let you swap hard drives from your case with just the turn of a latch. I love hard drive racks and the new sata racks are completely trayless and as easy as can be to use. Really ideal for such testing.
- Another alternative to a bootable restoration cd is to use a drive CLONING procedure instead of a drive IMAGING procedure, to directly make a copy of your hard drive onto another drive, which can be swaped in directly in an emergency, without needing to ever perform an image file restoration. The downside to this is that you can usually fit several compressed image files on a backup drive so they use a lot less space. The upside is you only need one spare hard drive (the drive you are going to clone onto), wheras with the imaging procedure, you typically need 3, your main drive, a drive to store your backup images onto, and then the drive you are going to restore onto. Cloning your hard drive is actually in many ways a simpler and more straightforward approach that you may prefer, especially with the cheap price of hard drives.
- TAKE YOUR TIME! Label your hard drives, be insanely careful about when you restore onto -- the last thing you want to do is wipe out your original hard disk while trying to test your recovery procedure. I like to keep my good hard drives way far away from me so there's no chance of making such a mistake.
- Don't even think about restoring back onto your main hard drive.. ever. You should always, when testing or restoring after a catastrophe, restore onto a spare hard drive. Only after you know for sure your restored system works well can you even entertain the possibility of reusing your original drive (assuming it wasn't a hardware failure that prompted the need to restore your backup. Until then you want to treat the original hard drive as a precious object not to be messed with, and you do not want to risk the restoration process failing and wiping out remnants of your original drive).
Hope that's of some use -- and please do get into the habit of regularly backing up your hard drive. :up:
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Helpful stuff, mouser. :up:
+100 for the external USB drive recommendation. My primary HD got fried a few weeks back and I had to make do with a makeshift PC till I got the drive replaced and had the PSU, etc looked at. I have a newfound respect for anything 'portable' (hardware/software/online services), that reduces your dependence on your main machine.
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With the prevalence of motherboards these days that routinely have an eSATA port, I'd expand on the external USB HDD by saying an external USB HDD WITH an eSATA port.
The cases are cheap enough if you want to roll your own, eg. CoolerMaster Xcraft series I've found are very reliable and work with all motherboards I've tried whereas the Vantec Nexstar seems to be rather picky about what chipsets it will work with.
And the time saved in multi-GB transfers is significant.
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I just did my first restore a few months ago - was very nervous but thankfully it worked
I'll have to take your advice mouser and get myself another drive to restore to.
I'll probably just stick another drive in the computer - it'll be a third drive; I might, as suggested, get a rack
I love hard drive racks and the new sata racks are completely trayless and as easy as can be to use.
-mouser
can you recommend one mouser ? a search for "hard drive rack sata trayless" at NewEgg (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=hard+drive+rack+sata+trayless&x=0&y=0) just gives three iStarUSA products which sound suspiciously like they only available in USA or N.America..
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When making entire disk images I'd also recommend putting an md5sum of the image in a text file along with it. If the drive on which you wrote the image has some kind of malfunction, before restoring you could check the md5sum and see if it matches the one previously saved when the image was created.
As a side note, if you're running anything other than windows you could use zfs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS) as filesystem on your computer (which is not available not just on Solaris but on GNU/Linux and Freebsd too) which has snapshot and clone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Snapshots_and_clones) functionality built into it.
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can you recommend one mouser ? a search for "hard drive rack sata trayless" at NewEgg just gives three iStarUSA products which sound suspiciously like they only available in USA or N.America..
here's a better search link at newegg (for "tray-less" instead of "trayless"):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=rack+tray-less&x=0&y=0
the one i have is the kingwin, but any of those will do.
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any reasons you want to give for this mouser?
and please do get into the habit of regularly backing up your hard drive
just curious.....
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any reasons you want to give for this mouser?
Well I had to do a hard drive restore not too long ago after a sudden hard drive total crash and failure. Everything went very smoothly, but i felt like i got a bit lucky in terms of having recently made a backup, and kept having visions of the nightmare that would have befallen me had i not made a recent backup or if i had not been prepared for it.
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Yeah, I do a backup daily if not twice a day occasionally.
Depends on the changes I made.
New software installed or other changes.
Still using paragon sytem backup, of which paragon's hard disk manager performs about the same, I use it as well. I haven't done the blank hard drive yet though. I will when I get the drive and the energy-lol-both almost the same!
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Let me add another more subtle tip, do not shoot yourself in the face by doing very frequent backups that always erase your last backup.
You might *think* you are doing a good thing by making very frequent backups, but if you are always overwriting your previous backup with the new one, what you are really doing is asking for trouble.
The problem is that problems don't always show up immediately.
Let's say you make a back up today of your system, and each time you back up you do it by overwriting your previous backup. So you only have 1 backup of your system, and it's from yesterday. Then tomorrow you get a virus alert and it turns out you were really infected last week, and it riddled your PC with viruses and wiped out your entire family photo collection, but you didn't notice it until today, when the new virus definitions got released.
Oops.. what do you do now? Your only backup is from yesterday, but yesterday's backup still had the virus on it. The same problem occurs if it's not a virus but you accidentally delete files or overwrite files and don't realize it for a few days.
SO.. the solution is to create drive images and stagger them instead of overwriting them. Keep multiple drive images spread out in time.. make a new one after major installs or updates, or once a month, and keep some going back for 6 months or so. You get the picture.
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Unfortunately I have HP systems and they aren't all that friendly how they set up the HD. At the moment I have external USB drives and a USB docking station for storing backup images. I looked at some of the drive racks on newegg and I'm definitely in favor of tools-free R&R. I'm wondering though, since HP insists on putting the standard HD inside this internal cage that's pretty inaccessible, if it's possible to install the HD rack using the unoccupied optical drive bay?
On another board the guy who talked me into getting the docking station says he just plugs in a drive every so often and dupes his current system onto it. If he gets a failure just R&R the drive(he assembles his own systems so I assume he either has a rack or a setup that's very easy to get at the HDs.)
So for us unfortunate off-the-shelf customers, is there salvation? :)
afa physical drive failure, I've been relying on the fact that the PCs I buy aren't super high performance, so they become obsolete before the hw malfunctions. Unfortunately I don't have room to line them up in a network along a big work bench as I'd like to.
btw-afa image backup and restore to a physically ok HD that's just had the boot info or partition info hosed, my recommendation, if you are going to use the image backup method to a compressed file as Macrium Reflect type of deal, if at all possible download the fully functional trial, make a backup image and try to do the restore using the boot/rescue CD. Chances are if the driver for your disk controller is not on the rescue CD, when you enter the program you'll notice it right away. One example is Paragon Drive Backup. I booted the rescue CD, but when I entered the restore program, my video went screwy and I had to hard boot. I was able to restore using "compatibility mode" but an hour restore job took me 9 hours. I basically had to just let the thing run all night. This program worked fine on my machine with the vanilla Sata controller, but with HP's new AMD Raid, it couldn't see the HD except in super slow motion mode.
Don't assume because it says "raid support" or whatever in the ad copy that it will work with your controller. In this case I downloaded the Macrium Reflect Trial, went through the entire image creation and restore and it worked flawlessly, so I bought it. btw the new free version has the updated Linux Restore CD so that may be worth a look if you are lazy like me an buy your PCs to run OOTB. :)
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Let me add another more subtle tip, do not shoot yourself in the face by doing very frequent backups that always erase your last backup.
You might *think* you are doing a good thing by making very frequent backups, but if you are always overwriting your previous backup with the new one, what you are really doing is asking for trouble.-mouser
This has got to be the single most critical point (that people keep missing...) mentioned so far. I've seen that plan go sideways more than once.
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I'm wondering though, since HP insists on putting the standard HD inside this internal cage that's pretty inaccessible, if it's possible to install the HD rack using the unoccupied optical drive bay?
as long as a cable will reach, the optical drive bays are the exact 5.25" size you need for a drive rack. give it a try.
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When making entire disk images I'd also recommend putting an md5sum of the image in a text file along with it. If the drive on which you wrote the image has some kind of malfunction, before restoring you could check the md5sum and see if it matches the one previously saved when the image was created-Gothi[c]
How do you obtain the md5sum of backup disk images? Is this an Acronis exclusive feature?
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You can use any software that does an md5 checksum. I have one here:
http://www.favessoft.com/crc.html
Many file managers like FreeCommander have them built in. I designed mine to allocate a large file buffer depending on the amount of physical ram in the system. It can process like a 9 GB iso file without choking.
You can get portable ones I'm sure from places like Softpedia. Mine is called FileCRC32 and it does either a CRC32 or MD5 checksum. You can use it on the file right after you make the backup, if your backup program creates a single file. It's not designed for computing a checksum for a folder. I wrote it to check downloads. It has a shell extension but I believe it will still work if you just copy the .exe file without the install. If it cannot register the shell extension you may get an error msgbox, but it should still work. I just looked at the source and unless you select the radio button to enable the shell extension I don't think it checks for it.
There are plenty of them out there. My main emphasis on this one was processing large files, so it may not be that bad for checking those 20 GB files that Macrium Reflect makes. :)
Hmmmmm, I'm doing one now from 20 GB Macrium image file. Looks like it will go through ok, but if you have a 64 bit OS you might want to try for one with 64 bit assembly algorithm. Mine is 32 bit Delphi with 32 bit asm code and a few years old.
It's pretty dependable if not the fastest. :)
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One thing I was wondering about concerning the rack... aren't the new drives like WD Caviar Black etc, designed to be mounted vertically? Does it mess them up to be running mounted in a horizontal position? I'm thinking the power down landing zone bit might not work as designed if the thing is running flat?
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Thanks Miles.
I don't suppose there's a way to check the md5 while the image is overwriting an older image? These image backups are huge. I don't have an external HD that has triple the space of the current HD.
New question:
Is the HD rack for servers only that requires some advanced tinkering only for power users?
I asked my mom who is working on a tech-related company to inquire about where to locally buy these racks but the person she asked told her it was for servers only and is very expensive.
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Is the HD rack for servers only that requires some advanced tinkering only for power users?
absolutely not -- we are talking about hard drive racks, which as you can see from the newegg links above are about $25.
they require no skill beyond that required to install a new hard drive or cdrom drive in your computer.
instead of hooking up a hard drive, you hook up the rack instead, which is the size of an old larger 5.25 half-height drive (exact size of a cd/dvd drive). then the normal hard drive slides into that.
as Miles points out, the only thing you have to make sure is that you have an open bay in your case -- something that would fit a cd burner.
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Thanks Miles.
I don't suppose there's a way to check the md5 while the image is overwriting an older image? These image backups are huge. I don't have an external HD that has triple the space of the current HD.
-Paul Keith
I tend to run with 70% or higher free space on my system drive. 20 GB after compression is typical of my Macrium Reflect image file. What I did was buy a USB docking station, then I got a couple of 750 GB Caviar Black on sale. I swap the drives. Also I made a partition on each drive for just the backup images. That way I don't have to spend hours defragging. Just delete all the backups in the partition(the other drive is in a box with recent backups, so I delete the backups on the drive with the oldest backups to "defrag" the partition on that drive.) I also have a couple of USB externals I got before the docking station thing was popular. I do some backups there too in case the docking station breaks.
For larger saves you may need to invest in some multi-TB drives.
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These image backups are huge. I don't have an external HD that has triple the space of the current HD.
-Paul Keith
Using a backup software that compresses backups and can do incremental backups:
I just checked & have 3 full backups and 14 incremental backups (so you could really call that 17 backups) - they take up 30GB space.
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I'm thinking the power down landing zone bit might not work as designed if the thing is running flat?-MilesAhead
The Quick Install Guide (http://products.wdc.com/?type=qig&id=wdfInternal&wdc_lang=en) shows the drive being mounted horizontally.
If anything, mounting it vertically would be more likely to affect any power down landing as being mounted horizontally the actuator always requires the same effort to 'park'. Whereas vertically, it either has to move up or down hill as it were, requiring more or less effort to move.
All in all, it really doesn't matter whether it's vertical or horizontal as, AFAIK, all current desktop/enterprise drives are designed with both types of mounting in mind.
Where it could possibly be an issue is where the drive is mounted at an oblique angle, in which case bearing load would probably come into play.
EDIT: Considering that probably 90% of desktops/towers use horizontal mounting, they'd probably be cutting their own throat, (income-wise), if they specified a vertical only mounting, (the Caviar Black is designed for Desktop not Enterprise environments).
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One thing I was wondering about concerning the rack... aren't the new drives like WD Caviar Black etc, designed to be mounted vertically? Does it mess them up to be running mounted in a horizontal position? I'm thinking the power down landing zone bit might not work as designed if the thing is running flat?
-MilesAhead
+1 with 4wd
Here's the official word from WD's knowledgebase:
WD drives will function normally whether they are mounted sideways or upside down (any X, Y, Z orientation). Of course, the physical design of your system may limit the positions in which the drive can be mounted. However, in all cases, you should mount the drive with all four screws for good grounding. Also ensure that there is enough air space around the drive for adequate air flow, and avoid mounting the drive near sources of excessive heat (such as some CPUs).
:Thmbsup:
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Thanks for the info. Seeing all these drives standing on edge must have psyched me into thinking they had to be that way. Must be just because stuff tends to be tower cases rather than the old horizontal desktop style these days.
It's funny because if you google you can get religious arguments going back a few years. The mount on edge guys think they have the edge on the flat earth types. It's good for a chuckle but I think I'm staying out of that one. ;)
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You can now get paragon's drive imaging tool in a very good free version:
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=20459
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And if you're running Windows 7, Microsoft now includes its own system imaging utility so most people who migrate over won't need to purchase anything extra. Recovery images can be stored on a hard drive, DVDs, or a network share. The image restoration process can be initiated through the control panel, the recovery console, or via bootable media if your PC is really screwed up.
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I've done some informal testing, and I'm pleased to say it works as advertised. :Thmbsup:
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What's important to me with an imaging programme is that it doesnt backup the hibernation file (2GB here) and the paging file if you have one on the C drive. Incremental backups are a big plus. Beyond that, of course (as mouser says) that it really works :)
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I bought the Paragon Drive Backup Personal 9.0. It has file exclusion on image backups which is okay if you want to exclude a few big files. For example I used to exclude my DVD folder. If I did a restore there would be "phantom entries" in the DVD folder for dvd images that didn't really exists... but just deleting them fixed that.
The problem comes if you have a folder tree with hundreds of files in it. The Paragon backup will tick off the name of every file it is excluding so that the backup will take 5 hours instead of 15 minutes. You are better off just to move the big files you don't want to throw away, onto an external drive before the backup.
So far I haven't found an image backup with exclusion that doesn't have this same problem. Other than that the Paragon is fine. One thing about the Macrium is you get network support without buying some "deluxe" version.
Also just a few days ago I tested the Macrium Linux boot CD and it recognized an internal Sata drive in a USB Docking station(which was a relief since I mainly use that for backups.)
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Given today's huge drives -- and the huge amount of data that tends to fill them up (nature abhors a vacuum), I don't think full drive imaging is a good solution. If it takes too long to image one's drive, it just won't get done often enough to provide proper protection.
My suggestion is to partition the drive into at least two logical drives. The C: drive should be relatively small (say, 30GB on a 500GB drive, 50GB on a 1TB drive) and should be used only for software installations (a pain to restore) and data that is critical and changes frequently, such as email, current work, etc.. Everything else should go on the D:, etc. drives.
The C: drive can then be easily imaged regularly. The D:, etc. drives don't need to be imaged, but rather should be mirrored or synced to one or more external drives, or a backup computer.
I have 4 logical drives on my primary work desktop system, with D:, E: and F: used for different types of data and storage. I create a full image of C: on another partition at least once a month and always before installing anything that might scramble something. At the end of each month, I image C:, copy the image file to a bootable DVD and store that in a fireproof safe in my basement.
On my working notebook (which has no built-in optical drive), I have two logical drives and regularly image C: to D:. I also keep a copy of the most recent image of C: on a bootable USB flash drive, from which I can restore the system to a working state in case of disaster on the road.
I use Acronis True Image Home (currently 2009) for my imaging and UltraISO to create my bootable DVDs. I never use incrementals (too fragile and slow to retrieve) but keep current work and critical data synchronized between a couple of systems (at the minimum, my desktop and notebook).
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I did the multiple partition thing so only my OS was on C: years ago. The trouble with Windows is even if you install stuff on D: or E: many of the applications, such as Visual C++/Visual Studio insist on putting a bunch of stuff on C: making it difficult to guess how much space to allocate. Back then I could jockey the drive space around with Partition Magic, but it was still a pita.
The approach I take now is to run with at least 70% free space. If I don't want to throw away what I'm deleting, I move it off to an external drive. Defrags are fast since there's plenty of free space to work with. Image backups are small, typically 20 GB after compression. I have a 2 PC setup with network so I can back up from my main machine to the external connected to the other machine, and be surfing with the secondary machine. I make multiple backups every week since it only takes between 10 and 20 minutes.
Periodically I back up to drives that are only connected during backup and I swap out the drive in the docking station so that I have recent backups in case all the connected drives should be simultaneously infected by some wonder virus.
The last time I ran with 80% disk space used was on a machine with an 80 GB drive. Once I got to 200 GB or higher I run them lean. The maintenance chores are all faster and (almost) fun since they rarely exceed 1/2 hour.
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Faster drives and interfaces will also have a major influence on how we chart our future backup plans.
Despite Intel's general foot-dragging over direct support for USB 3.0, it is starting to make its appearance courtesy of ASUS and some other board manufactureres. Once USB 3.0 becomes more generally available, there will be some additional options available for various backup strategies.
A few USB 3.0 hardware links for anyone interested:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/exclusive_first_usb_30_and_sata_60_expansion_card_will_sell_30
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/highpoint_announces_sata_6gb_controller_availability
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/new_asus_motherboards_boast_true_usb_30_and_sata_6gbs_compatibility
The new 6Gb/sec SATA spec also holds promise.
Good intro article here: www.maximumpc.com/article/news/seagate_amd_demo_6gbsec_sata
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Don't even think about restoring back onto your main hard drive.. ever.
Done that, the output was like a black hole in the universe.
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This is such good advice, thanks mouser.
I've been through the ringer about all this backup business. Back in 2003, my IBm Deathstar failed and I lost a huge amount of music. I didn't have any backup in place at the time. Since then, I have been very crazy about backing everything up. In my current computer system (see thread here (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=16186.0)) you can see how many drives are added simply for the purpose of backing things up.
The setup goes like this:
--Main hard drive (for OS and apps)
--Main hard drive (for documents and files)
--Backup #1 (backs up the two main drives above; images for the OS drive, file-synching for the document drive)
--Backup #2 (backs up backup #1, accomplished through file-synching)
I even have an additional spare drive since I'm using a 2-bay enclosure. backup #1 is inside my tower, backup #2 is in the external enclosure, and the other bay just has whatever spare drive in there (I just use it to play around with things). Now, that means I'm using a total of 5 drives! I'm almost crossing the line between a normal home PC and some kind of mini-corporate server setup.
Is my setup perfect? not really. As mouser said, there can be several weaknesses even with all the redundancy I have. For one thing, I haven't figured out a good schedule for doing images (for the main drive). I basically just do it occasionally whenever I feel like it. Then, do I replace existing images? Do I do some kind of incremental system? Do I do separate images for each time? The issue with imaging is that the files are very big, and even with cheap drives, you can fill them up pretty fast with images. And it's not just an issue of getting additional hard drives (which ARE cheap). If I add more drives now, i have to think about doing a serious server setup...with NAS connections, or RAID, or I don't even really know about that stuff. Once you get into that, the equipment gets really expensive.
Another issue is that all of this stuff is located in the same room. I should probably keep an additional drive in my parents' house or something. Or back it all up with some kind of uploading service. There is a lot to consider here. Backing up properly is a complex thing. People who don't know a lot about computers have no idea what is involved. Imaging, multiple drives, file syncing, external enclosures. A lot of people think all they need to do is burn their files to a DVD.
One thing I worry about is just like mouser said. I have the backup drives (where one backs up the backup). But let's say I get a horrible virus that infects everything and that gets backed up, and then the backup gets backed up. Well, now I have triple-redundancy, but they are all completely infected. So what now? I don't know...that's where incremental backups and versioning comes in. But then you will start need more drives, and you get into the whole thing I mentioned above. You see how crazy it is? Ugh...
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A few questions.
I use an eSATA external drive an am very happy with it.
But does anyone know if this eSATA external drive could ever be plugged into a laptop? Will eSATA be a standard at some point?
Second. Since I'm running windows server 2008 as a desktop, many backup programs want an eye and a leg to work there. Does anyone know of a good imaging tool (for the system partition) that does incrementals and is free/cheap?
Third... how do you test a system partition backup? I'm not comfortable risking the entire setup just to test the backup...
Thanks
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here's a good blog article where ten commercial imaging apps are compared. 10 Commercial Disk Imaging Software Features and Backup/Restore Speed Comparison (http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2009/11/23/10-commercial-disk-imaging-software-features-and-backuprestore-speed-comparison/)
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Third... how do you test a system partition backup? I'm not comfortable risking the entire setup just to test the backup...
-urlwolf
If you don't use swappable drive trays, the easiest way is to temporarily install a spare hard drive into your PC and do a test restore onto that.
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This test looks ambitious. Perhaps I am not able to navigate this website, but where are the actual tests? Big introduction, nice feature table, and then I cannot find any tests and only a two-sentence conclusion (Acronis wins on features?).
here's a good blog article where ten commercial imaging apps are compared. 10 Commercial Disk Imaging Software Features and Backup/Restore Speed Comparison (http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2009/11/23/10-commercial-disk-imaging-software-features-and-backuprestore-speed-comparison/)
(see attachment in previous post (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=20337.msg185545#msg185545))
-lanux128
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I have used Windows Home Server (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx) as my backup/fileserver solution since its inception (I was part of the beta test group). I can't say enough good things about it. I don't use a pre-built box; I bought the software and built a box specifically for it.
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I have used Windows Home Server (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx) as my backup/fileserver solution since its inception (I was part of the beta test group). I can't say enough good things about it. I don't use a pre-built box; I bought the software and built a box specifically for it.
-skwire
Looks interesting, i didn't know about it. I'll have to check it out!