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Dave,
I hear your pain - I have been there myself although
fortunately not on Christmas Eve.
Thank you for sharing your solution. I agree that the
simpler the solution the more likely one is to do it
faithfully. Your method does that. I like some aspects of
your method better than my current one, but I will outline
mine to reinforce some of your ideas and to give others an
idea of possible variations.
The major difference between our two approaches is that
your apparently backs up everything by the same method.
That is the simpliest way to go, so there is a lot to be
said for it.
My current method is to back up data separating from
programs. Programs are installed on drive C along with
windows. Data goes onto drive D. My AB databases, for
example, are on drive D. Also D holds my CSI database plus
all the notes of posts about how to use AB, etc.
Thanks to a post by Yuki, xxcopy is used to back up my
data. There are back up programs with fancier GUIs, but
xxcopy does the job it has a lot of options about what and
how backups are made. One has to be able to use NotePad to
write simple BAT files. If one is not comfortable with
that, then another program is the way to go.
Drive C holds the windows system and program files. I use
TrueImage to back it up. I back this up BEFORE installing
anything new (such as new drivers, or video card). Once I
am sure it is working properly, I back the C drive a second
time.
There is about 11 GB on my C drive and it backups into
about 6 GB in a True Image file. That takes about 25
minutes.
I could use TrueImage to back up D drive which has my data,
but that would mean redoing the backup of items that have
not changed since the last backup. With about 50 GB on my
data drive, that would take about 2.5 hours. By contrast it
only takes xxCopy about 5 minutes to do a backup because it
only has to copy those data files that have changed.
As mentioned in another post, I back C drive and D drive to
E, which is another 120 GB hard drive internal to my
computer.
Once a week or so, I hook up an external USB2 drive and use
xxCopy to copy any items on E that have changed since the
last backup. xxCopy will happily copy the already made
image files created by TrueImage so my external USB2 drive
contains back ups of everything of importance: C drive
(programs) in TrueImage files and D drive (data).
I have 2 disks that I just swap in and out of the USB2
drive case (I just leave the top of the case to make the
swap faster). One of the disks gets stored off site so even
if there is a fire, I could be up and running again after
buying a new computer and restoring C and D drives.
b
--- Dave Merrill <dmerrill@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Christmas eve morning, I woke up to a computer that said
> it had no hard
> drive. Of course this happened during a time when the
> quantity of data I
> need to back up every night had outgrown CDs, and you can
> guess the
> expensive and highly unpleasant rest.
>
> So, my business partner and I have done a lot of research
> into backup
> hardware and software recently (:-). We wanted roughly
> what you're after,
> backup not just of selected documents, but the entire
> state of the computer,
> with reasonable ease and redundancy. You'd think this
> would be easy, even
> built into a reasonable OS, but it turns out it's fairly
> tricky, especially
> if you have always-running databases etc. like we do.
>
> You may or may not agree with our conclusions, but here's
> what we decided to
> do; sorry for the length, hope it's helpful.
>
>
> For hardware, we're both using Granite Digital hotswap
> FireWire cases, with
> three 250G drives in hotswap trays that we rotate
> through. If you have USB2,
> which I don't, that's nearly as fast and equivalent cases
> are available,
> many of which speak both.
>
> For the actual disks, I'm using the Western Digital 8 Meg
> cache drives.
> They're fast, reasonably cheap, and have a decent rep for
> reliability. My
> partner went with Maxtor I think, saving a bit of money,
> with a bit lower
> reliability I'd guess. Seagate is probably also good.
> Between the three
> drives, I should have full backups going back roughly two
> months before I
> have to start cleaning off older ones. If the most
> recently used backup
> drive happens to be dead, there are backups from each of
> the two prior days
> on two other separate drives to try before I'm really
> hosed.
>
> This is a laptop, so backing up directly to drives that I
> could just swap in
> and boot from isn't really a sensible option. I plan to
> get a another laptop
> drive as a spare, and to rehearse restores without the
> risk I'll end up dead
> in the water. If you have a desktop with a spare 5.25"
> bay, hotswap internal
> bays are cheaper than FireWire, and in case of disaster,
> you can just boot
> from your backup directly if you set up for that; see
> below.
>
> For software, we're using BootIt
> (http://www.terabyteunlimited.com). BootIt
> is a partition and boot manager, as well as a drive
> imaging tool,
> inexpensive shareware with great support and straight
> talk via a newsgroup.
> It's a bit geeky to get started with, but once you've got
> a handle on it,
> it's literally a one-step operation to back up, and
> another to give the
> files a dated name. I have small batch files to do both
> those things; let me
> know if you want me to send them to you. In the mode I
> use, the computer
> restarts directly into BootIt running under DOS, backs
> up, then continues
> booting back into Windows. This lets it back up system
> files, my databases,
> and anything else that's always in use during normal
> operation. Sounds like
> overkill, but there's no other way that actually works.
> This is how Ghost
> and other similar tools work too. I have Ghost too, BTW,
> and besides being
> flaky in general, its FireWire support is way shaky
> (can't see past the
> first FW partition, etc.).
>
> BootIt can create either compressed images, which I use,
> or straight file
> system copies, which my partner does. The image files are
> smaller, but if
> you can back up directly to a drive you could boot from,
> straight copies are
> useable instantly without any restoral nonsense.
>
>
> The great thing about this setup is that it's bone
> simple. No backup
> catalogs, expensive SQL database backup plugins, complex
> ya ya, just a
> single coherent image of the entire state of the machine.
>
> Full backup of a 20G drive on a 3-year-old-speed laptop
> takes about an hour
> and a half, including bit-for-bit validation of the
> image. Total cost was
> about $1K.
>
> In the probably obvious department, I'd suggest
> rehearsing/verifying your
> restore process beforehand. You also want to make
> multiple copies of any CDs
> or floppies you'll need, and print out detailed restore
> instructions,
> software manuals, software and hardware company phone
> numbers, and any other
> notes you'll need.
>
>
> Not to be melodramatic, but unfortunately, drive failures
> aren't something
> that happen to Other People. My partner learned from my
> train wreck without
> having to go through it himself. If you (anyone, not just
> you Mark) haven't
> thought through what you need to do to protect yourself,
> take the hint
> (=:-).
>
> Dave
> I want to create and maintain an exact copy of my
> current hard drive
> on a second hard drive so if the first one crashes I
> can boot from the
> backup and work without any delays. I thought this
> would be simple
> but when I started looking at all the options
> available, I didn't see
> a clear best solution... especially when it came to
> software.
> Thoughts/ideas? Thanks in advance.
>
> Mark
>
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