pc.hardware.storage - backup strategy - help please

  • Thread starter Thread starter DonLogan
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DonLogan

So here I am:
I chose to use 2 hard drives
one master & one to be used to store a "backup" of the
primary/master/whatever. (don't mention the war! - meant to say RAID)

How do I set up xp + whatever application and/or procedure, to create
the best/easiest/current capability to restore, after a hardware
failure of the master.

you may have seen this asked before, by me.
sorry
should be raid 1 but i may not have a choice, so was looking for
second best.
any recommendations for another group?
 
DonLogan said:
So here I am:
I chose to use 2 hard drives
one master & one to be used to store a "backup" of the
primary/master/whatever. (don't mention the war! - meant to say RAID)
Click to expand...
How do I set up xp + whatever application and/or procedure,
to create the best/easiest/current capability to restore,
after a hardware failure of the master.
Click to expand...

You dont say how active your data is. If its low enough, one viable
approach is to do a backup every night, with something like True Image.

That wont stop you losing the day's work if the
main drive dies just before the daily backup tho.

You can get more protection by say doing hourly incremental
backups with something that can do that like True Image, so
you wont lose as much if the main hard drive dies.
you may have seen this asked before, by me.
sorry should be raid 1 but i may not have a
choice, so was looking for second best.
any recommendations for another group?
Click to expand...

This one is as good as any for something like this.

One thing your latest scheme and raid 1 dont cover is
catestrophic failure of the power supply that frys both
drives, but that isnt very common at all and you can
protect against that to a limited extent by using a decent
power supply that has adequate protection against that.

You wont be covered for theft of the system, or fire or flood
etc. That may not matter if you are already backing up the
most important stuff to say DVDs etc and moving them off site.
 
So here I am:
I chose to use 2 hard drives
one master & one to be used to store a "backup" of the
primary/master/whatever. (don't mention the war! - meant to say RAID)

How do I set up xp + whatever application and/or procedure, to create
the best/easiest/current capability to restore, after a hardware
failure of the master.

you may have seen this asked before, by me.
sorry
should be raid 1 but i may not have a choice, so was looking for
second best.
any recommendations for another group?
Click to expand...

I use True Image from www.acronis.com - you can get it cheap at newegg
if you're in the US.

I have TI do this:

- Full image once a week to a second internal or external drive.

- Incremental image, to the same name as the full image, once a day
except for the full backup day. After the full backup runs, the
incrementals overwrite last week's incrementals.

- Alternate full image, to a different name, once a week, 3-4 days
away from the main image. This gives me an independent backup in case
something's wrong with the main one.

Now, I'm a bit paranoid about data loss, so I also copy the alternate
to a network drive in a different location, in case something happens
to the main system like theft. Now and again, I burn the backups to
DVD and stash them in the safe. Those aren't always completely up to
date, but they have things like 10+ years worth of photos and
documents.

I set TI to do this in the middle of the night, and also tell it to
run at powerup if it wasn't on when the backup was scheduled, so I get
my daily update whether the computer's on at the scheduled time or
not.

The main risk is if something interrupts the main backup, in which
case your entire backup set is hosed, and that's why I make an
independent alternate backup. Incrementals being interrupted just
loses the incremental data.

It's been working fine for several years, and has saved my bacon quite
a few times now. Restoration is very quick, depending on the amount
of data, and your system starts up exactly like it was at the last
image.

max
 
So here I am:
I chose to use 2 hard drives
one master & one to be used to store a "backup" of the
primary/master/whatever. (don't mention the war! - meant to say RAID)

How do I set up xp + whatever application and/or procedure, to create
the best/easiest/current capability to restore, after a hardware
failure of the master.
Click to expand...

You could use a drive image program like Drive Snapshot (full system
backup of a running windows partition). On my PC, it takes less than 50
seconds to backup my C: drive to the second disk. The resulting file
size is about 350 MB (XP SP2 installation CD created with nLite).
you may have seen this asked before, by me.
sorry
should be raid 1 but i may not have a choice, so was looking for
second best.
any recommendations for another group?
Click to expand...

In case you want to restore all of the C: drive, you'll have to use a
bootable windows CD (BartPE or UBCD4WIN). Some minutes later, you'll
have your running windows OS.
 
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