Mickey Mouse said:
One thing about living on the other side of the world is you wake up
in the morning to all these replies.
And to all the above posters;
The overwhelming theme of all these replies is the failure of the backup
drive (same drive).
Frankly, I knew the answer before I posed the question. I was looking for
confirmation.
Ok, the censensus is that a second (destination drive) is warranted.
I agree, if the destination drive is the same as the originating drive
You can't image a drive to itself, because it would generates a loop.
then a problem
occurs if that drive mechanically fails. Having said that I must ask,
what's the percentage
of corrupted harddrives as opposed to failed harddrives?
That distinction has a lot less meaning than the incidence of failure for
any cause. Corruption can be unrecoverable.
As the saying goes, dead is dead.
I've come across many systems
that were corrupted for one reason or other, but only a couple with
mechanical failure.
Failure can be electrical, not just mechanical. I run into this often
enough to have a stack of such failed drives in a drawer.
I also have on my desk a very badly corrupted laptop drive that isn't
responding to any sort of recovery software, and the owner doesn't want to
pay the bill for the next step, giving the drive to a recovery service;
those bills start around $1K, the largest I've personally seen is $5k for
recovering a 20-gig drive. There were no backups.
I have another drive on my desk that is failing as I try to recover from it.
I've retrieved much, but not all.
For those paraniod about the drive failure, I'm afraid the odds don't
stack up in your favor.
This paranioa
Sorry, but this is not paranoia. It is simply prudence and responsible
behaviour, based on real-world experience.
Drives do fail, in various ways, and the reason is not so important as the
result. If you don't have a backup, you risk losing the contents.
If your data and work and time have no value, then this isn't a problem.
If they are of value, there are simple, reliable, and inexpensive solutions
available.
The choice is yours.
is like a scuba taking along a spare pressure guage in case the one on the
tank fails.
Sure, the guage might fail, but more likely he'll run out of air first and
be able to access his
reserve air on the same tank.
Don't me wrong, it's a much better idea to have a dedicated backup drive.
I do believe though
that you're more likely to have a corrupt drive than a failed one.
A drive from which data cannot be recovered and a drive that has failed
electrically or mechanically have the same result.
The contents are gone, and you need a new drive.
You might say that it's like dying from lead poisioning. It doesn't matter
if you drank the lead or were shot, the result is the same. You're still
dead.
Of course, when one has the
backup on the same drive, Murphy's law comes into play.
Again, in imaging, the source generally cannot be the destination (as this
would lead to a loop), and all recovery apps try to prevent you from
attempting to recover to the source drive.
In respect to the manual I'm digesting, I'm refering to the PDF on the
Acronis 9.0 disk I bought. I didn't
buy the manual/guide seperately. I don't have issues with it, yet.
Another reason I posed the question is that it's been my experiance most,
and I mean most users only
have one drive be it multi-partitioned or all just one partition. I know
people with say a 500gb
harddrive all partitioned as C:. Here they keep the system, installed
applications, and storage folders.
That is a real concern, especially now that Terabyte drives are becomming
popular. Can you imagine,
a novice with a terabyte drive who installs anything and stores everything
on the one terabyte C:drive.
What a laugh (and a tech's dream machine).
Not really. If you recognise that a rebuild to new hardware generally
requires reinstallation, your backup of the OS and apps is the install
media. If you like, you can create an image after configuring the system
and before installing the data.
From that point, you only have to back up the data, and that's generally not
an extremely large data set.
File sets that don't change often, such as photos, can be just copied off to
a couple of DVD's and stored as needed. They don't need to be backed up
every day.
My clients have external drives with complete disk images that are refreshed
only peridoically - part of the problem with an incremental re-image is that
there are files you don't need to update but which *will* be refreshed, and
these files are large, for example, pagefile.sys. The size of that file is
related to the amount of installed RAM, and it changes constantly.
They also have external drives or disks that contain daily backups of their
data.
Recovery, when it's been needed, has been quick, easy, and reliable.
There's been minimal disruption.
Another poster suggested making three backups and keeping one in a
firesafe, safe deposit box or offsite in case of fire or theft.
This is normal practice for any responsible business or person.
In addition, those who hold information from others, such as accountants or
medical records, may find that they are legally required to have secure
offsite backups.
Again, it's just standard practice for any business.
but you neglected to mention earthquake or
nuclear attack.
What's needed is to take reasonable precautions. It's reasonable to
attempt to account for predictable risks such as fire and theft.
In some areas, earthquakes are part of the normal risk and are taken into
account.
In that case he'll need to put his third backup in the safe deposit box,
put the safe
deposit box into the firesafe, take the firesafe offsite and bury it in
someones backyard and then hope
we're not invaded by Martians. (so hard to type when laughing!)
Oh, chicken little,.... the sky is NOT falling!
You can joke about the risks, but that doesn't negate them.
HTH
-pk
