Building a Backup System: Looking for suggestions/comments

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zolointo

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Afternoon all,

My 2009 started off with a no-compromise bluescreen situation, which then lead to an XP rebuild. Bit of a drag, and I'm looking to avoid this situation in the future by building an external backup solution.

Here's what I have planned so far:

Internal Components (already have these):
- 34 gig system software drive: XP, Office, other applications
- 160 gig storage drive: games, downloads, documents, development, picture libraries
= 200 gig total

Backup Plan:
- take a drive image of the system software drive in it's base configuration and store on External Drive A. Stored as an Emergency/Square One backup
- Emergency Macrium USB key for restores kept with EXT.A
- take nightly incremental backups from the storage drive on External Drive B
- take weekly system software and storage drive disk images, maintaining two weeks of images (older images are deleted) on External Drive C
- not concerned about disaster situations (fire/flood/etc)

External Components Plan:
- external interface: ThermalTake eSATA hotswap dock, connected to motherboard via SATA to eSATA bracket
- External Drive A: 100 GB SATA (can accomodate several different builds, if needed)
- External Drive B: 1.5 TB SATA
- External Drive C: 500 GB SATA

Software:
- Macrium Reflect

Backup Schedule:
- one-time disk image capture to EXT.A. Disk is stowed away.
- EXT.B is always in the ThermalTake dock, and nightly incrementals auto-scheduled
- EXT.C is docked once a week for full disk images of both drives, and then stowed away until next week

Conclusion:
How does this look? Is there a better way to approach this? Any suggestions are most welcome as this entails dropping ~$500 for relative peace of mind.

Thanks for taking at this!
 
looks good to me, what program are you going to use for imagebased backup?

you could look into WHS for automated imagebased backup....
 
Was looking at Acronis 2009 at first, but something about Acronis the Company rubbed me the wrong way.

I've been using Macrium Reflect Free for some of my initial testing, which does disk image based backups. The full version permits incrementals/differentals, which I think would be a nice to have for my storage drive.

I don't know much about WHS outside of a quick Google after you mentioned it. I do know that I'm not looking to setup a secondary PC just for backups, so I think that vetos using WHS, right?
 
well yes, except.....


I am running WHS on Vmware server 2.... so i am running a virtual WHS on my vista ultimate machine....

it works well, but if it is the only machine that you have then a restore from a virtual machine wont work,

i think your plan works well... acronis is what most people use or Norton Ghost...
 
Just wanted to add a few notes to this thread in case anyone else is trying to do something similar.

Gear
- MSI K8N mobo, 4x SATA ports
- Vantech Nexstar eSATA Hard Drive Dock (http://www.vantecusa.com/front/product/view_detail/372)
- 500GB eSATA drive (ripped out of a HP Media Drive USB enclosure)
- OS: Windows 7 Beta
- Backup software: Macrium Reflect

Setup
Ended up purchasing the Nexstar eSATA Hard Drive Dock because it includes the eSATA to SATA bracket for your case. No need to purchase any additional cabling or brackets.

Although there is no weight at the bottom of the dock, so far there have been no weird sound or vibration problems.

After installing the bracket, connecting the dock to the eSATA port, and sliding in the HDD, I jumped into the bios. Hard drive is detected just as any other SATA drive would be.

Win7 boots up. HDD in the dock is listed in Explorer.

Problem: Swapping Drives
My intention for the external dock was to be able to swap out drives on the fly without reboots. Unfortuntely, the drive was not listed in the Safely Remove Devices list.

Thinking that Win7 might just take care of the messy stuff, I hit the power button on the dock. Drive turns down, but is still listed in Explorer. Explorer had cached a good deal of the folder structure, so it was still explorable. On attempting to execute a file, Explorer sat their spinning and the box needed to be reset.

First: SATA - Check for hot swappability
Doing some searches, the first thing I discovered is that not all mobo SATA ports are hot swap capable. Now, things might be different in 2009, but my 2+ year old mobo was on the cusp of a time where some ports were hot swappable and some were not. I found SATA hot swap information on my mobo in a random forum versus MSI's site, so I cannot tell you what search terms will result in a conclusive answer.

Second: Update system drivers
I had to update my ForceWare drivers for the NVIDIA hardware on my mobo. Did so via the auto-installer on NVIDIA's site.

Third: Install HotSwap!
After this, I still could not find a location in Windows to safely disconnect my drives. Quick searches located a utility called HotSwap! (http://mysite.verizon.net/kaakoon/hotswap/index_enu.htm). This utility will allow you to swap out anything that is swappable, including eSATA and SATA drives.

Software places an icon next to your clock. On clicking the left-clicking the icon, a list of removable devices is displayed. Clicking a device name will initiate the remove function. This will fail if anything is touching files and folders on the drive.

For the Nexstar dock, I stopped the drive via HotSwap, powered off the dock, and physically ejected the drive. Then to test further, I seated the drive back in the dock and powered it back on. Drive appears almost instantly in Explorer.

Note: There is no cooling device in the dock at all, so docked HDDs will get fairly hot... not burnt fingers hot, but definately not entirely comfortable to handle. Also, the drive needs a couple of seconds to fully spin down after you have stopped it. If you yank it to soon, the force of the spinning drive can make it awkward to handle and perhaps a little unsafe for the drive, too.

Next Steps
I am still working on defining my backup schedule. The free version of Macrium Reflect probably would have cut it, but I figured the software works so well for me that I purchased the full version.
 
Thanks for the info on HotSwap, zolointo. My mobo does not support hot-swapping either.

Waiting for delivery of:
- Seagate internal SATA drive.
- Thermaltake USB/eSATA docking station.
- SATA/eSATA cable/bracket (no eSATA port on my mobo).

I have Paragon HD Manager 2009, currently used to backup OS partition to a partition on my main drive and partiton-maintenance. I'm obviously screwed if my main drive dies.

Plan is to do a weekly raw sector-by-sector clone of my main drive to the Seagate, so I can just replace my main drive in the event of main drive failure.

Regarding backup/restore apps, I've used Terabyte IFW/IFD, Acronis TI10 and Paragon. All have provided reliable backup/restore of my OS partition. All equally reliable perform with equal speed.
 
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