Backing up a hard drive, What to use?

[Dave N.]

Hey Folks, Hope everyone here had a good Christmas and New year.

I wanted to get opinions on software to use to back up a hard drive so that I can back up Windows XP and all on it.

Just had a hard drive go out in my Daughters PC and had to install a new HD and re-install Windows XP and her other software she uses, what a pain

I heard Norton Ghost is supposed to be good but was wondering what other software is good too. Any freeware out there to do this?

Thanks

Dave.

[defaced]

I try to avoid Norton products because the stuff I have used was very bloated and slow. I have used Active software for other things, and would recommend checking out their disk image software:
http://www.disk-image.net/

It should let you demo it for a couple weeks to a month to see how you like it.

[Don Moose]

There's a free program called Clonezilla that I have used with some success. You have to be equipped to burn a CD from a .iso image file, but there are other free tools that will do that.

Clonezilla will save and restore disk image files, though. Not individual files/directories. I used it to move an XP installation from a 20GB HDD to a 100GB one. Had to make a few tries to get a 100GB partition on the target drive, but I did get it figured out.

Have you poked around SourceForge? You do have to specify that you are looking for Windows or XP stuff, but it's free and most of it (that I have tried) is pretty good.

[Dave N.]

Hey Fellas, thanks for that info, I'll check those programs out and see what works.

After having to completely replace a hard drive and lost data from the old bad one it taught me a lesson. Lost some good info I had been saving for years ranging from some good amp schems to some killer pics of guitars that I have seen and saved on the net, made a screen saver program with those cool guitar pics too...

Cheers



Dave

[R.G.]

If you think about it a little bit, it is 100% certain that if you keep using computers, one day your hard file will die. At that point, you will with almost 100% certainty buy a new hard file, if not a whole new computer.

Since you will eventually have to buy a new disk, why not buy it before your current drive dies? It's not that costly. Right now you can get 1Tb (that's 1000Gb) for $100. I just did that. With that much space available, just mirror your working hard drive to the back up drive at whatever intervals you could stand to lose - once a day, once a week, once a month, whatever.

This *completely* ends the issue of losing it all unless your house burns, floods or is vaporized in a nuclear attack. And it's fast. And it's automatic.

And you can look for special deals on disks instead of having to buy one RIGHT NOW.

Just a thought...

[dai h.]

definitely, data loss, data corruption is bad bad news. Talk about an ill feeling. Had multiple hard drive failure one time and since then I try to back data up semi-religiously. Like RG says, a massive 1TB disk is very affordable and come down a lot in price. Bought one (Seagate 3--somethingsomething--AS) for about 80 bucks(incl.COD and shipping). Plus an Antec external drive case for about 20. Using hard disks for backup seemed to be the most practical (cost vs. storage space, speed compared to say writing a DVD, etc., speed of accessing data). Seem cheap enough that you could even set one aside with your backup data. Also, my understanding is it's best to have three copies total. Incl. myself I've seen at least several instances of data loss here(at ampage)--guitar, amp stuff, schematics, etc. that had been accumulated over the years, etc., so... watch out!

[mitchb_199]

buy another hard drive the same size and set up R.A.I.D it will clone the hardrive and all the files . simple..

[Bill Moore]

When I had this old computer built, the builder installed a copy of Casper with all the other stuff. It also had a removeable drive bay, and 2 extra drives. I backed up daily to one drive, and used Casper with the other, monthly, to clone the complete C drive. This summer the computer started locking up, my tech guy, (old high school friend), said the drive is dying. I told him about Casper, and he was able to clone the C drive to a new drive before it completely quit. I have a small business, and all my information, and customers information is intact. When I put the old machine back on line, Casper came out with ver. 5.0, which I bought. The first time you use it, it may take more than an hour to copy your drive, but the monthly backup only copies the new info, and takes less than 15 min. I feel like I was lucky to have the program installed, (my tech guy now has Casper on his machine).

[Steve Conner]

There is one important Gotcha with RAID. (RAID level 1, to be pedantic.) The "backup" drive is online all the time, which means that the contents of the two drives are kept identical.

So, it protects you against failure of one of the drives. But if you delete a bunch of important stuff by mistake, or your computer gets a virus, your goof is instantly duplicated onto the other drive.

This is why we call it a mirror and not a backup. A real backup would let you retrieve a copy of your files from 3 days ago before the virus hit, or whatever you needed.

Mirroring and backups both have their places in enterprise IT, but for the home, a regular backup is usually enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

[insp166]

Does anybody partition their big hard drives into 4 smaller ones?
I was taught you have one partition with you operating system on it
And the rest for your files.

That way you can replace or fix the operating system without losing the rest of you stuff

[R.G.]

Originally Posted by insp166

Does anybody partition their big hard drives into 4 smaller ones?
I was taught you have one partition with you operating system on it
And the rest for your files.

That way you can replace or fix the operating system without losing the rest of you stuff

Close, but no cigar.
Use two or more real, no fooling hard drives. Hard drives are so cheap today that you can easily whip in a 20GB drive just for the exclusive use of your operating system and paging space. It may be hard to find one that small.

You then buy TWO data disks. One is your everyday disk. The other is your backup, which you store images of your everyday disk in at intervals that you can accept losses. You leave your back up disk off line when it's not backing up. Putting the back up on a USB exterior drive is smart, so it can be both powered down and put in a safe place between backups.

NEVER put data on your OS disk, or anything else which cannot be restored from program CD/DVDs.

[Steve Conner]

What R.G. said. I've always set up my computers this way, unless they were laptops with no room for a second disk. Having two physical disks speeds up audio editing too: you put your temp files on the OS drive and your audio on the other drive, so the data just spools between the two drives instead of thrashing the heads around. Of course in these days when everyone has 2GB of RAM, that probably doesn't matter any more...

The only gotcha is that Windows insists in keeping stuff in C:\Documents and Settings\*your user name*\ and that is on your OS drive. I've never figured out how to move it. This tutorial shows how to move your "My Documents":

http://thundercloud.net/information-.../my-documents/

but it would be neat to move the whole Documents And Settings tree, the way you can move /home in Unix.

I recently discovered a cool program called FreeFileSync. It's not technically a backup program at all, rather a synchronisation one, but it really fits my way of working. I just plug in the external USB drive after doing any important work, and run FreeFileSync to copy over any changed or updated files.

The reason why I say it's not a backup program is that if you modify a file, it will overwrite the old file with the new one. Most good backup software keeps your old versions, so if you mess up a file and back up the SNAFU'd version, you can retrieve a previous good version. However, at least FreeFileSync lets you preview what it's going to do before it does it.

[R.G.]

Originally Posted by Steve Conner

The only gotcha is that Windows insists in keeping stuff in C:\Documents and Settings\*your user name*\ and that is on your OS drive. I've never figured out how to move it...
I recently discovered a cool program called FreeFileSync. It's not technically a backup program at all, rather a synchronisation one, but it really fits my way of working. I just plug in the external USB drive after doing any important work, and run FreeFileSync to copy over any changed or updated files.

Imagine a file utility that checks the contents of C:\Documents and Settings\*.* every so often and whenever it's different, it updates a copy on another drive, with a different name. That way the copy is almost always exactly the same as the stuff on C:.

And as we all know, almost always is almost always as good as always.

[defaced]

RAID 1. I'm waiting for Seagate to get their stuff straight, but I'm thinking two 1.4TB drives in RAID 1 for storage and and my 35GB Western Digital Raptor for system are the way to go. With My Documents being stored on the storage drive, the only personal files that wouldn't be mirrored would be the contents of my desktop. That's something I can live with.

[dai h.]

possible issue is with some windoze RAID configurations, file writes can be excruciatingly slow, so a regular drive(or external) might be less of a PITA (not making two copies at the same time but might be much faster overall).

[Steve A.]

Originally Posted by Steve Conner

What R.G. said. I've always set up my computers this way, unless they were laptops with no room for a second disk. Having two physical disks speeds up audio editing too: you put your temp files on the OS drive and your audio on the other drive, so the data just spools between the two drives instead of thrashing the heads around. Of course in these days when everyone has 2GB of RAM, that probably doesn't matter any more...

The only gotcha is that Windows insists in keeping stuff in C:\Documents and Settings\*your user name*\ and that is on your OS drive...

I was thinking the exact same thing. Also many programs expect to be installed in the default folder which is on the OS drive.

So I let all of the little sh*t files store themselves in My Documents, but for the bulky audio, video or graphics files I save them on my collection of external drives.

I added a _SUITCASE folder to My Documents which I use when I want to upload a file to a site. That makes things a lot easier because the default file open dialog box lets you click on My Documents (rather than have to navigate through My Computer to a specific folder, usually nested deep) and _SUITCASE will appear up near the top of the list.

When you get as old as I am you don't want to waste your remaining time clicking through directory trees looking for files- I try to use the default associations to my advantage.

Steve Ahola

P.S. To help me recover from OD disc crashes I have been keeping an INSTALL folder on one of my external drives with all of the programs I have downloaded along with the install keys, etc. I used to copy the install floppies that came with hardware but that usually isn't necessary anymore. I keep the INSTALL folder backed up regularly and haven't had to use it to recover from a disastrous crash for a long time (knock on wood).

[bob p]

Originally Posted by insp166

Does anybody partition their big hard drives into 4 smaller ones?
I was taught you have one partition with you operating system on it
And the rest for your files.

That way you can replace or fix the operating system without losing the rest of you stuff

Originally Posted by R.G.

Close, but no cigar...

IMO, you're both right, but for different reasons.

Like RG said, to perform an effective BACKUP you need to store the data on different physical devices, not different virtual devices or drive partitions. Its actually better to have the physical devices in separate physical locations, to get that added degree of protection from fires, floods, natural disasters, etc. Being a linux g33k, I have a dedicated firewall, dedicated internal and external virtual file servers, and several dedicated workstations.

The file servers use an automated back-up procedure that scans for updated files at fixed intervals during the day, and updates a shadow copy of the data that is stored on a different physical device within the same box. In the middle of the night all of the data is automatically sync'd over a secure socket shell to another computer in a remote location that stores a mirror image of my fileserver's data directories to provide redundancy.

There is GREAT enterprise-level software that you can obtain for FREE to automate the entire process. The price that you pay for remote backup administration though, is a rather steep learning curve. If you're interested, google for "bacula".



The idea of putting the OS and the /home user data on separate drive partitions is very popular in the linux community, as it helps to compartmentalize and separate the OS from the user data. In traditional unix installations, this would routinely be done on separate physicial devices on the network.

On a desktop, the drive partitioning method you suggested makes it much easier for and end user who might want to try out different linux flavors to perform OS changes/upgrades. compartmentalization prevents their users' personal data from being co-mingled on the same drive (or partition) with OS data. volumes that have the OS data stored on them are routinely reformatted by installation programs, while /home volumes typically are not. at least that's true in the non-windows world, where some of the installation software is actually somewhat intelligent. :P

If you're automating your backups by scripting methods, using a bash script to back up a volume can make things easy from a conceptual standpoint, but like RG said, for safety and security, copy the data for backup to a separate physical device to achieve maximum protection.


oh, and about RAID -- i don't see that anyone has yet mentioned the critical differences between RAID that is performed at the hardware level vs. the software level. IMO, you should NOT EVER use software raid. once cpu hickup and your volumes are corrupted. Always use hardware RAID, or steer clear of RAID altogether.

HTH

[tommy d]

Bob has enterprise level networks with backups and an obvious expertise as a system administrator, which is required of his setup.

Originally Posted by bob p

oh, and about RAID -- i don't see that anyone has yet mentioned the critical differences between RAID that is performed at the hardware level vs. the software level. IMO, you should NOT EVER use software raid. once cpu hickup and your volumes are corrupted. Always use hardware RAID, or steer clear of RAID altogether.

HTH

I'll go further and say never use software RAID,

Never build a system partition on a RAID drive (in the event of hardware failure you will need exactly the same RAID card or you will never access your OS again which is why generic file sytems NTFS/SATA are preferable)

Never use RAID 0 "performance striping" because if you lose any data, you risk losing the both drives! You are actually increasing your risks of losing data and for music it is totally wasted b/c SATA II is blazing fast for audio.

The smartest safe way to use raid is: RAID 5, Non O/S data, Redundant Array from a hardware card that is common as dirt. Now you have data and what not on a redundant disk array that will "rebuild" itself in the event of the loss of one disk. The price is you lose the capacity of one disk per redundant array, a size efficency bonus above that of RAID 1 which is 1 to 1 copying.

The problem with network backups is that they are SLOOOOOWWWWWWW and if you are at all inclined to tinker will find yourself upgrading your perfectly fine 10/100 to gigabit routers/switches CAT6 for a pretty penny and toal reconfiguring for wireless including new security protocols and router restriction schemes. Wireless data backup? --> Shoot me now!

The way I recommend for super ciritical data is RAID 5 for data (like DAW) and a non-partitioned NTFS for system with regular "images" from Acronis or the like. The problem wtih partitioned images arises when the original disk has died and the new disk is different --> Norton ghost fails on this one all the time b/c it can't adapt partitions with new size geometry and messes up the MFT. In fact, if ghost loses one bit of its backup taken to DVD or CD the, whole thing goes south. Why can't it just skip the bad data and move on? BTDT

With non partititioned fat32/NTFS system disk you can totally blow away the entire disk and be back up and running in 30 minutes after catastrophe and your precious data is umolested on different drives. BTW I follow all the basic take the important stuff off site (which isn't much but I know it will survive the apocalypse) For DAW clients/projects burn a DVD set of the files and give them to the client or take them offsite.

The cool thing with images is that when I get a virus/spyware (rare) or I update a batch of drivers and one of them sucks - I just wipe the whole disk back to the last known good state and problem solved. This way you just have a few files to save manually between images to say a thumb drive or something. An invlauable strategy for people who view computers as tools and not hobbies.

BUUUT - just imaging with Acronis regularly to an eSata or USB will serve you very well with the caveat that actually test your backup with a real run through!

[aferaci]

I use carbonite. (carbonite.com) It's $49 a year and it constantly updates and backups my harddrive as long as I'm online and it doesn't affect my computer's speed at all. If your hard drive ever goes bad, you just go to their website and restore it. This is my 3rd year with them and I have no complaints.

[oc disorder]

Anyone tried or using this ?
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-windows.htm

Um I don't want this to sound like an advertisment but..\
Image for Windows is an affordable, reliable drive image backup and restore solution that provides an easy and convenient way to completely backup all your hard drive's data and operating systems. Your backups can be saved directly to external USB and FireWire™ drives, to internal or network drives, and even directly to CD or DVD. The Image for Windows package includes an easy-to-use MakeDisk wizard for creating a recovery boot disk. To restore your data and operating systems back to the way they were when the backup was created, simply boot the recovery disk and restore the partition(s) or drive(s) you need to recover

I normally keep anything precious on a big external usb drive.