Please recommend a standalone, external backup - storage solution

[RedShred]

Hey y'all

I have a stand alone Win7 home premium machine that manages our building security and electric locks.

It is not hooked up to the LAN and will not be.

If this machine takes a digger - it will be a single point of failure for the buildings security. Not an option as you'd expect.

Can somebody recommend an external HDD software solution that will allow a bare metal restore and do incremental backups as well?

Thanks for your ideas.

 

[-Dragon-]

Any USB drive and windows backup?

 

[Neb]

Large USB drive + Macrium Reflect

 

[-Dragon-]

From the home page that doesn't seem to do anything that windows backup doesn't also do and it's already on the OPs computer (though he may have to "install" it from add/remove features)

 

[Neb]

True, windows Backup will probably do the bare minimum that he needs and he could probably go with it for that, but Macrium I've found is a much better if you want any sort of control over the process. With Macrium you can run verification runs on the backups to check their integrity, the bootable cd recovery process is fair bit more robust, it doesn't depend on shadow copies for it's incremental backups, and there's no guesswork whether or not it'll actually do a full or incremental.

The rules that determine when to take automatic full backup are:
1. If previous full backup was taken 1 year back
2. Ratio of size of deleted files + older versions of files in current backup set is 50% or more of the size of the current backup if it were full.

We deliberately did not allow forcibly starting new backup set or configuring these rules through our UI because we did not want to confuse users about full backups, incremental backups, automatic full backups.

http://codydunne.blogspot.com/2010/10/fullincremental-backup-cutoff-in.html

 

[tamana]

USB Drives are the best options, rest you can also use VCD or separate hard disk. It all depends upon how much data you want to store

 

[Innocence]

Beyond backups also make sure you're running AT LEAST redundant Hard Drives (RAID1, Mirrored, whatever). It's much better if a drive dying doesn't take the system down at all.

Of course, have a backup. Directly connected NAS (or "Ethernet Disk") would be faster if it's Gigabit vs. USB2.0, and would be my suggestion so you don't need to keep it physically next to the box. Assuming you want Fire/Flood/Theft protection.You wouldn't need to put it on a network for this - just have one dedicated line running from the PC/server to the NAS in a different secure room and give them both static IPs on the same subnet.

Make sure to test the backups if at all possible do a full recovery dry run on non-production hardware so you're not panicking if it ever comes down to it. Would be a good idea to have at least a cold spare available if it's actually a critical machine as well.

 

[-Dragon-]

Pretty sure with windows backup you can specify multiple drives to back up to and it will alternate days which drive it goes to so you can get redundancy that way.

 

[Hulk]

+ macrium

 

[drescherjm]

delete

 

[RedShred]

Some really good ideas. Thanks.

Macrium looks like a really good solution. Setting a RAID now is too late. I wasn't here for the setup.

 

[Innocence]

Some really good ideas. Thanks.

Macrium looks like a really good solution. Setting a RAID now is too late. I wasn't here for the setup.

You could at least do software Volume mirroring in Windows. A backup is great, but rebuilding still takes time.

Better than nothing - I had to do it on a couple servers in our telecom system when I took it over 5 years ago and it's saved my ass twice now.

 

[GeorgeHR]

I think it is important to keep a backup of the OS and ssecurtiy software. You can do that once.

And it is important to keep a backup of your "security" data. You might want to do incremental or full backups each day or week.

But however you do your backup, practice restoring the data a couple times to make sure it works.