runLoganrun
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What program creates a backup, and continues to back up, on another drive that would be bootable. Any?
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backing up hard drives
- Thread starter runLoganrun
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runLoganrun
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Windows XP x64. I thought about raid 1 but it's one big drive to back up a boot drive and a media drive. Raid only works for identical drives right, and not partitions?
thanks.
thanks.
runLoganrun said:
raid will just be configured to use the smaller amount of the tow drives.. 160gb and a 80 gb drive.. it would use 80 gb from both drives and the rest of the space is wasted.. I would also definately look into a mirror setup raid 1.....
raid-1 is very ideal, but i only recommend using a hardware based card instead of windows built-in raid capability. though i'm not sure what raid card manufacturers have 64-bit versions of drivers for their raid cards. that will require some homework. my brand preference of card for consumer level has primarily been "promise".
additionally, you can also use xp's built-in backup software since you can backup to a single file. this could be used to backup everything to another harddrive, internal or external (such as usb/fireware hard drive).
better software solutions can be purchased from norton ("ghost") and veritas. again, i'm not sure about their compatibility with 64-bit xp, so more homework is needed on that aspect as well.
additionally, you can also use xp's built-in backup software since you can backup to a single file. this could be used to backup everything to another harddrive, internal or external (such as usb/fireware hard drive).
better software solutions can be purchased from norton ("ghost") and veritas. again, i'm not sure about their compatibility with 64-bit xp, so more homework is needed on that aspect as well.
runLoganrun
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So Raid 1 will utilize a 80GB drive and an 80GB partition of a larger drive but still allow the use of the rest of the space?
runLoganrun
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So what's the best way to back up in this scenario. Use Ghost to back everything up and then in the event of failure I have to re-install Windows and then "restore" everything. What if I'm using a drive just for storage, movies, etc., how do I restore it without there being an OS on that drive? Does that work?
runLoganrun
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jordan12 said:
So what about the boot disk. Do you have a seperate one? Is that "backed up" in entirety?
RAID 1 is not ideal as a backup solution. RAID 1 is ideal as an availability solution.
The obvious benefit with RAID 1 is that you continue working after the hard drive dies.
The problem with RAID 1 is that if the hard drive is screwed up by the OS, through some filesystem screwup (trust me, it happens), or through physical damage to the PC/motherboard (like a power supply that blows), both drives are hosed.
An ideal backup solution is an external USB or Firewire drive that lives outside the PC and is turned on only for backup purposes, accompanied by a monthly set of DVD's that are kept off-site, like an office or school locker.
I use Genie Backup Manager Pro to do both, and have AES encryption turned on so no one can make off with my data. If you'd prefer to restore your previous OS exactly, and not reinstall, in the event of a disaster, then use Ghost instead.
Heck, you could get a hard drive twice as big as the one you're backing up and keep both a Ghost partition and another partition with just the files you want backed up. This is really ideal because if you accidentally delete some stuff you want, you can just go to the file backups without cloning your HD.
The obvious benefit with RAID 1 is that you continue working after the hard drive dies.
The problem with RAID 1 is that if the hard drive is screwed up by the OS, through some filesystem screwup (trust me, it happens), or through physical damage to the PC/motherboard (like a power supply that blows), both drives are hosed.
An ideal backup solution is an external USB or Firewire drive that lives outside the PC and is turned on only for backup purposes, accompanied by a monthly set of DVD's that are kept off-site, like an office or school locker.
I use Genie Backup Manager Pro to do both, and have AES encryption turned on so no one can make off with my data. If you'd prefer to restore your previous OS exactly, and not reinstall, in the event of a disaster, then use Ghost instead.
Heck, you could get a hard drive twice as big as the one you're backing up and keep both a Ghost partition and another partition with just the files you want backed up. This is really ideal because if you accidentally delete some stuff you want, you can just go to the file backups without cloning your HD.
There is an important distinction between creating an 'image' of all contents of a boot drive - and creating a 'clone' of a boot drive.
A 'cloned' boot drive is directly bootable (see original post) - but the 'image' of that boot drive is not directly bootable.
To restore an 'image' of a drive in the event of mechanical failure, the physical drive must be replaced before the image can be restored to the replacement drive. I know of no 'imaging' backup/restore program that can restore an image to the same volume where the image is stored.
Ghost and other programs provide a clone/copy function - and drive-makers offer their own free utilities to create a perfect 'clone' of a bootable drive. All you have to do to boot the cloned drive is enter BIOS and select the cloned drive as the boot drive.
I've used free utilities by both Maxtor and Western Digital to create perfectly cloned boot drives. Both worked flawlessly cloned multi-partition boot drives.
Hope this helps!
Edit: I know of no program or utility that automatically maintains a perfect clone of a boot drive - except the RAID suggestions. There is an obvious problem with that automatic approach:
- If the drive is infected with virus/spyware/trojan/rootkit, the infection(s) is/are also cloned.
Obviously, some thought and effort should be applied to keep/make the source drive as clean as possible before cloning (or imaging). Further, I suggest that the cloned boot drive should be off-line except for the duration of creating/updating the clone - to prevent infection. A hard drive in an external USB/Firewire enclosure seems appropriate, switched off when not in use.
A 'cloned' boot drive is directly bootable (see original post) - but the 'image' of that boot drive is not directly bootable.
To restore an 'image' of a drive in the event of mechanical failure, the physical drive must be replaced before the image can be restored to the replacement drive. I know of no 'imaging' backup/restore program that can restore an image to the same volume where the image is stored.
Ghost and other programs provide a clone/copy function - and drive-makers offer their own free utilities to create a perfect 'clone' of a bootable drive. All you have to do to boot the cloned drive is enter BIOS and select the cloned drive as the boot drive.
I've used free utilities by both Maxtor and Western Digital to create perfectly cloned boot drives. Both worked flawlessly cloned multi-partition boot drives.
Hope this helps!
Edit: I know of no program or utility that automatically maintains a perfect clone of a boot drive - except the RAID suggestions. There is an obvious problem with that automatic approach:
- If the drive is infected with virus/spyware/trojan/rootkit, the infection(s) is/are also cloned.
Obviously, some thought and effort should be applied to keep/make the source drive as clean as possible before cloning (or imaging). Further, I suggest that the cloned boot drive should be off-line except for the duration of creating/updating the clone - to prevent infection. A hard drive in an external USB/Firewire enclosure seems appropriate, switched off when not in use.
Yes, indeed they do. However, Iron Mountain may be a little excessive for a simple desktop hard drive backup, and keeping encrypted offsite DVD's, even in a school locker, is one of the few secure, cost effective ways of restoring your data in case of a disaster such as, say, your house burning down.nomak said:
In my experience, backups created using NTBackup are very, very unreliable. On more than one occasion, I've attempted to restore a backup file using NTBackup only to have the program tell me the file is invalid for some reason. And there's no recourse since the whole damn thing is in a single file.
Also, NTBackup lacks significant features, like spanning a backup across multiple pieces of media and encryption.
Also, NTBackup lacks significant features, like spanning a backup across multiple pieces of media and encryption.
I agree that can be a PITA, but almost all backup software does that. NTBackup, Veritas, Ghost etc.kumquat said:
Agreed. But I doubt any home user NEEDS encryption. And as far as spanning media, I believe you should backup to a seperate physical HDD. Optical media isn't very reliable either.
Not to argue or anything (just some friendly debate), but I'm just a home user. I keep a DVD set in my office, though, and very much appreciate the fact that the cleaning lady can't just walk off with my DVD's and have all my data. I think DVD's are more than reliable enough for a monthly, sits-in-the-office backup. After making DVD's and CD's for years, I have yet to have one completely fail on me that wasn't my fault for leaving it on my desk to get scratched up.S1nF1xx said:
Also, yeah, Ghost and others use a single file, but through extensive use of Ghost and Veritas I've never had one spontaneously fail on me the way NTBackup has..
I'm all for debates, in a good one usually everyone learns something.
We just disagree with our personal preferences. Just to clarify
-I don't believe NT Backup is the be-all, end-all in backup software. It works, and it's free.
-DVD's are very usefull in a backup scenario where your combining it with a HDD IMO.
Everything boils down to the experience of the user doing the backups, and what they are backing up.
For instance. I don't do full system backups at home, except for my server. I use ntbackup to backup My Documents, my saved game folders, and any other config files and random stuff like that. It all goes to a folder on my server, which is grabbed by another backup routine and sent to an external HDD.
All my archived files are stored on my server and backed up to the external drive as well.
All my important files are backed up about once a month to DVD and stored off-site.
I've lost data before and now I'm really anal about backing up.
For a normal home user that wants to backup their entire system in case of failure, I recommend a second physical hard drive (external for ease of use) and a program such as Veritas, Ghost or ntbackup to backup everything to that drive. In the rare event of a drive crash, it's easy to reinstall and load the OS.
My main gripe with optical media is that the end user has to be involved in the process, which as most of us techs know, means that it never gets done.
When you setup a drive, they never have to touch it, and never even know it's there. So the backup actually has a chance of being done.
Just remember people. RAID 1 is NOT a backup solution. It was designed to reduce downtime and nothing more. RAID 1 won't save you from a virus, corrupted files, or user error. A good backup solution will.
We just disagree with our personal preferences. Just to clarify
-I don't believe NT Backup is the be-all, end-all in backup software. It works, and it's free.
-DVD's are very usefull in a backup scenario where your combining it with a HDD IMO.
Everything boils down to the experience of the user doing the backups, and what they are backing up.
For instance. I don't do full system backups at home, except for my server. I use ntbackup to backup My Documents, my saved game folders, and any other config files and random stuff like that. It all goes to a folder on my server, which is grabbed by another backup routine and sent to an external HDD.
All my archived files are stored on my server and backed up to the external drive as well.
All my important files are backed up about once a month to DVD and stored off-site.
I've lost data before and now I'm really anal about backing up.
For a normal home user that wants to backup their entire system in case of failure, I recommend a second physical hard drive (external for ease of use) and a program such as Veritas, Ghost or ntbackup to backup everything to that drive. In the rare event of a drive crash, it's easy to reinstall and load the OS.
My main gripe with optical media is that the end user has to be involved in the process, which as most of us techs know, means that it never gets done.
When you setup a drive, they never have to touch it, and never even know it's there. So the backup actually has a chance of being done.
Just remember people. RAID 1 is NOT a backup solution. It was designed to reduce downtime and nothing more. RAID 1 won't save you from a virus, corrupted files, or user error. A good backup solution will.
chojin_1999
Limp Gawd
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Well, I guess the best backup method you should use depends on how anal you want to be. The enterprise versions of Ghost (and Norton Ghost 2003) use a DOS environment which, if your server only uses IDE channels, is easy as pie to schedule a clone backup image of your drive to another drive or just burn an image to DVD's.
The newest version of Ghost (repackaged V2i Protector backup software *tested and approved*) cannot create a straight boot image. You can create incremental/full backups in real-time (no reboots necessary), however, you have to boot off your Ghost CD into a WinPe/Bart-PE type environment and load your disk drivers in order to perform a restore. It sometimes takes about 5-10 minutes to boot into this environment. You can schedule as many incremental and full backups as you want.
Incremental/full backups are the best option for backing up/restoring critical data for production servers. For home servers, Id stick with the Ghost DOS option for simplicitys sake. For all versions of Ghost, there may be incompatibilities with some raid controllers. Some people will say "it works for me" and yes, it works on their particular raid controller.
Oh yeah, I use Windows Backup for my home system because no version of Ghost can reliably talk to the raid controller on my DFI NF4 Ultra-D board. Windows Backup is a valid solution that has been tested and used (not many times since FUBARs are not supposed to happen ). Just make sure you set your Windows Backup to check for integrity after it is done making a backup. Yes, Windows Backup does not make a boot image and yes you will need to be able to get into your Windows environment or install a base Windows environment in order to restore a Windows Backup.
The newest version of Ghost (repackaged V2i Protector backup software *tested and approved*) cannot create a straight boot image. You can create incremental/full backups in real-time (no reboots necessary), however, you have to boot off your Ghost CD into a WinPe/Bart-PE type environment and load your disk drivers in order to perform a restore. It sometimes takes about 5-10 minutes to boot into this environment. You can schedule as many incremental and full backups as you want.
Incremental/full backups are the best option for backing up/restoring critical data for production servers. For home servers, Id stick with the Ghost DOS option for simplicitys sake. For all versions of Ghost, there may be incompatibilities with some raid controllers. Some people will say "it works for me" and yes, it works on their particular raid controller.
Oh yeah, I use Windows Backup for my home system because no version of Ghost can reliably talk to the raid controller on my DFI NF4 Ultra-D board. Windows Backup is a valid solution that has been tested and used (not many times since FUBARs are not supposed to happen
). Just make sure you set your Windows Backup to check for integrity after it is done making a backup. Yes, Windows Backup does not make a boot image and yes you will need to be able to get into your Windows environment or install a base Windows environment in order to restore a Windows Backup.IMO, the ideal solution is a file server with RAID 1 to mirror your data. Little daily stress on these drives (compared to your machine's main drives), and easily shareable (I think I just invented a word) over a p2p network. Backup THAT data to an external FireWire drive once each week, and store it at mom's house. That way, if someone breaks inot your house, there's a fire, or your PC gets a virus, you have an offsite backup.
Of course, this is close to top level for most home users, and you can trickle down from there to an ideal one-touch external backup drive.
Of course, this is close to top level for most home users, and you can trickle down from there to an ideal one-touch external backup drive.
DigitalMP said:
See, the problem with this is that RAID 1 is not meant to backup data. It's meant to mirror an OS drive so that incase of a HDD failure you can get your server back up in only a few minutes. The only scenario RAID 1 will cover you in is a dead HDD. RAID 1 won't keep you from losing data if it becomes corrupted, accidentally deleted and overwritten, infected, etc. Even RAID 5 isn't a guaranteed backup.
I know I'm anal about this and sound like a broken record, but I've got customers who rely on RAID 1 for backups. It doesn't work. Data becomes corrupted, files get overwritten, spyware and viruses hit. Backing up to an independent drive (HDD, tape, optical, flash) is the only real way to guarantee a secure backup.