ot. pc back up

I doubt whether anyone has ever wanted to...

Austin Shackles came up with the following;:

It's debatable whether anyone would want to. ;)

As with anything, properly backed up data and maybe a ghost or image is the real key to less stress .. ;)

Yup. Wouldn't have any Doze machines if it were up to me, needs and customers must etc. Ghost is the only solution for workstations and desktops, works alright for servers too I guess, but we don't have any Doze servers.

The perfect solution is rsync and a small script called synchro which acts as a wrapper for rsync and backs everything up each night.

RAID falls over if two drives fail at the same time - which is a real shit.

Mother"

About 8 months ago. One of Gradwells servers IIRC, Richard Ashton spent a long sleepless night fixing it. Killed all Control postings to unna and formal injections regarding the uk.* hierarchy.

Course, for true resilience, RAID, rsync to another RAID then rsync to a eNAS box 250 miles away, which is itself rsync'd locally... :-)

Hard drives are cheap...

So, back to the original post, is this the best way: Separate hard drive (USB?) and use Ghost to back up both drives? Richard

Richard came up with the following;:

Depends upon your idea of 'best'.

Certainly it's a good solution, but I would still think that having two 80G drives both using less than 20% of their capacity is a bit of a waste and you'd be better served by combining all the data onto one drive, maybe partitioning it 30/50G split. 30G as c: drive for programs and applications, and 50G for data. Then use the other 80G drive as the backup medium for ghost images of both the partitions..

Doing it this way would mean you could totally automate the process in a way that will be easier to implement and use than an external drive as there are no connections to make and break each time a backup is required.

Richard....

Your house gets broken into and your pc gets stolen. If you are backing up from one hard drive to the other, tough, you have just lost the lot.

The important thing for you to do is backup your irreplaceable data. The stuff you cannot go to the shops and buy. Typically, your photo's, word processing, spreadsheets, database etc. and don't forget your e-mail folder and address book.

You will almost certainly find that all the text based stuff will fit onto a cd, you may need to resort to a dvd, but text based data does not really take up much space. If you have a big collection of photos they can be saved to dvd (or two?). It is photos and videos that take up huge amounts of space. I have individual images bigger than 100MB but for most people they are a great deal smaller.

Having backed up your irreplaceable data onto removeable media (cd / dvd) AND made more than one copy AND tried reading the copy to make sure that you really do have a copy! you can store that copy off-site (garden shed?) or at least where it will not be destroyed or stolen at the same time as your pc.

When it comes to backing up your operating system and your installed programs, it is, as some have already suggested, not a bad idea, and quite convenient, to ghost an image onto another drive. That will give you reasonable protection against the failure of your hard drive, or what is actually more likely, the corruption of that drive either by a virus or, even more likely, by a bit of finger trouble.

My preferred structure is to partition your two drives to give yourself 4 x

40GB The primary partition on the first drive would be C: (call it "progs") and this would only contain the operating system and installed programs. The primary partition on the second drive would be D: (call it "data") and this would contain your irreplaceable data. You can configer MS Word, e-mail, address book etc. to use this drive by default.

You will then now know that if you back up everything on D: your data is safe. At the moment I expect that it is probably all over the place and if C: gets hit with a problem you may be "stuffed".

When it comes to assigning drive letters, if your operating system allows it, use "higher" letters for the other drives. Your CD rom drive could be R: for example. It can make life a bit easier later if you add more hard drives. Games and some other software that access a cd while in use needs a consistent drive letter.

Anyway, back to where we were, you still have a second partition unused on each physical drive. Let's call them M: and N: So your first hard drive contains C: and M: and your second hard drive contains D: and N: Copy (create a ghost image) D: to M: and C: to N: If one of your hard drives fails, you can now restore from its backup on the other drive.

Drives are very cheap (80GB about 30 pounds). Losing your photos and documents could be catastrophic.

Don't bother with Raid arrays. Even mirroring is a waste of time. DO back up your irreplaceable stuff onto cd dvd or even onto a hard drive that you then remove from the pc and keep it somewhere else.

There are lots of strategies. Once your data is safe, it is not a bad idea to wipe you hard drive and re-instal Windows from scratch every year or so, or whenever it gets a bit clunky. It gets rid of all the crap that builds up, bits of progs that have been installed and "removed" (they never are completely).

Les

On or around Wed, 24 Aug 2005 12:25:49 GMT, "Richard" enlightened us thusly:

There's a certain amount to be said for a USB HDD which can be detached from the machine.

however, a cautionary tale:

make sure the batstard will work, though. A friend of mine got one to back stuff up onto, but it comprehensively failed to work under windows 98SE, despite apparently being compatible according to the box. [supposition, unproven, it was preformatted with NTFS][1]

so, on the advice of others, said friend (who's not a computer geek) decided to upgrade to windows 2000. The upgrade failed, I know not why, and I was then asked to try and sort it. I ended up putting XP on it, for want of an OS to install which I knew worked (possible that the 2000 install CD was faulty or something, or some odd hardware incompatibility).

XP install went fine, saw the USB drive no problem. However, the process removed all files from the desktop (since the desktop gets remade into an XP one) which included a whole heap of pictures which were intended to go on the new USB drive, and yes, you've guessed it, not saved elsewhere. Major, universe-sized bummer. However, although geeky types like me know that saving stuff (only) on the desktop is not a good plan longterm, nothing in windows ever tells the ordinary user that: seems entirely reasonable that something you want to get at is in a folder on the desktop, at first sight. For all I know, it clears the "my documents" stylee things that windows always clutters the machine with, an' all. Personally, I don't use any of 'em - I have my own preference for a data directory tree, and it's on a different partition than windows.

[1] so it could maybe have been solved by a reformat, probably on someone else's machine that recognised it as a drive.

On or around Wed, 24 Aug 2005 14:05:30 GMT, "Dadio" enlightened us thusly:

The main thing this bit saves you is time, though. the OS and installed software can be re-installed from its original sources, generally. One thing I do have is a directory with all the install files I've ever downloaded (or most of) and several copies of that on CDs around the place. Especially relevant for stuff which vanishes, like the CD-cloning software which has all suddenly disappeared in a rash of copyright-infringement paranoia.

Not that I used it for making illicit copies... I have one that lets me mount virtual CDs which is dead handy for all that software that insists on seeing the CD in the drive before it'll run, and saves having a raft of CD drives.

modern software has a tendency to notice that the CD is not original, unfortunately.

On or around Wed, 24 Aug 2005 12:51:03 +0100, "Paul - xxx" enlightened us thusly:

what about those Hitachi/IBM deathstar drives?

there are sometimes batches of HDDs which all go down about the same amount of use, and sods law says that you'd get 2 in yer RAID which died simultaneously.

apparently Seagate are now good, having been through an unreliable pacth a bit back and upped the quality accordingly.

A Doze virtual CD - how quaint! What is its name?

A good RAID setup should have at least one cold spare waiting to spring into action as soon as one fails, so even if 2 fail they'd have to fail within about an hour of each other not to allow the array to have become redundant again.

But you can't do it all with belt, t'is true. That's where the braces of a disaster recovery tape (and cupboard full of spare drives) come in.

On or around Wed, 24 Aug 2005 18:37:38 +0100, Mother enlightened us thusly:

The one I favour is called Fantom CD, will copy-and-burn images of CDs and I believe DVDs, and will mount the image files on any number of virtual drives, which will auto-remount at boot-time if asked. Limits apply like presumably the number of drive letters and the fact that typical CD images are about 700MB each, so you tend to eat HDD rather fast.

The reason i use two drives like that is that c is the 'normal' drive and d has loads of pics and video on. In the past when i used to use just one drive it went wrong and i lost everything. so i figured operating system on one drive and pics on another. safer??

Richard