Back up

[Sawyer]

I am looking to get a new harddrive. Basically it will be a back up drive with more space to grow into. Anyone one have an opinion of what is best? I have seen a lot of produces is there something that I should stay away from?

 

As always thanks

 

Cheers

[Frosty]

Hi Sawyer.

If you are serious about a back up system, I think the best way to go about it is with RAID 5 set up. The reason I say this is due the cost and reliability of HDs today. They sure are cheap and they sure act like it. HDs fail. The only real method of protection is redundancy and can be accomplished with a RAID system.

This could be built in an inexpensive server (think old P2 or P3) or internally in your workstation. You will need a RAID card (about $100) and three or more matching drives. I think most people know to stay away from the IBM Deathstars. I would reccomend the WD models with 8MB cache. Whichever drives you choose, they get attached to the RAID card in a normal fashion with the exeption that the card is able to "join" them into a single drive in your OS. There are multiple methods of joining the drives, each with pros and cons, but RAID 5 is what you are after. The three drives will become striped and mirrored which means that you will get a speed increase as you access all drives at once and added data safety as this system is also redundant. Any one of the drives can self destruct or be removed without any loss of data. If you do suffer a drive failure, replace the damaged unit with a new drive and the system will rebuild. More than three drives can be used in this setup, but keep in mind that you will lose the capacity of one drive in the set(ie. 3 X 80GB=160GB not 240GB, 5 X 80GB= 320GB not 400GB).

 

I think this is probably the most cost effective way to back up large amounts of data in an extremely safe manner - well....it still wont save you from theft, fire, flood, tornado, ect.

 

[ June 17, 2003, 07:51 AM: Message edited by: Frosty ]

[Mistyk]

Hi Frosty!

 

Your description sounds more like RAID 5 than RAID 0, are you sure you don't mean RAID 5?

[mbr]

RAID is the way to go if you have the cash to spend. So far (knock on wood), I've never had any problems with the 10 or so hard drives I've owned over the last 7 or 8 years. They've all bee either Maxtors or Western Digital.

 

I just bought a DVD burner and a Maxtor 200 GB (7200rpm) external drive that I can stick in each computer. It has one tough back up and is USB 2 and Firewire compatible. It was about $400.

[Frosty]

Thanks for catching that Mistyk. I frequently mix up the numbers. You are indeed correct. RAID 0 is striped for increased throughput - ie. video editing.

 

mbr: I'm glad that you've had such great success with your HDs. I have not had the same fortune. I have had 3 of 5 Maxtors blow up in one year. I think it is due to the "cost savings" used on all modern HDs. As far as I know WD is the only company to offer a drive with a 3yr warranty - other than SCSI units which are still usually 5 yrs.

 

Most manufacturers are great about RMAs on defective drives, but that does nothing to help you recover your data or meet your deadline. I dont think enough people properly consider the implications of a drive failure. Its not something you want to have happen on a mission critical work station.

 

I think your choice to use a DVDR is probably also a very wise one.

[Greg Hess]

I use a Sony DRU500A with Norton Ghost.

 

Just clone the system to DVDR's every other week. And restore if the system melts.

 

Harddrive failure is pretty rare, and usually as long as the drive itself isn't actually damaged, you can get the data off with restorer 2000 pro, and spinrite.

 

Raid of course is the best way. A cheap raid 1 with a cloning system is extremely inexpensive, and prevents both drive failure and OS failure.

[Sawyer]

Good info all thanks. I know I just not qualified to look into the server/raid set up. I would need hand holding on that. But thanks for the idea seems very reliable.

 

I was thinking of external hard drive but Greg you say a dvd writer is the way to go (I take because of faliure rates in hard drives). And Ghosting backs up everything files and config?

 

Then what are reliable names? Or at least are there names that are notably bad?

 

Thanks

[plastic]

i use scheduled batchfiles to mirror the data on the file server to the workstations. (what else should i do with the huge amount of gigabytes on modern hd's?)

the fileserver uses a raid-1 array. if one drive fails there is no interruption. in case that the server fails i prepared one of the workstations for server tasks, switching to it is a matter of minutes.

that should be save enough. in case that the whole office burns down, or whatever, i also backup to DAT once in a month, and store the tapes at home.

once in a year i burn everything to cd-r, because i don't really trust the DAT tapes. (although they are pretty reliable)

[Greg Hess]

Basically ghost works like this.

 

You tell ghost you want to clone the system.

 

The system reboots in nortonghost mode. You choose your DVD burner as the backup solution, and it will clone your system to the dvd disks.

 

Each disk holds 4.3 gigabytes (4.7 after its formatted), so however much data you have will factor how many disks it will take. (Ghost does use compression)

 

You can choose to clone the system, different drives, or different partions.

 

If you do a full clone, it exactly mirrors the system on the disks. EXACTLY. You can use nortonghost to clone a 20 gig system, onto a new 80 gig drive, and it will port over flawlessly.

 

After the partion/disk/system is cloned...run a verify on the disks, to make sure everything is 100% correct. (If its your primary backup medium).

 

If you ever have a system problem, you plop in the norton ghost cd (first disk in the set) and tell it to restore the partion, the disk, or the system. Va la.

 

Its pretty snazzy and a definite major admin tool. (I use it almost daily).

[mzagorski]

I have what I considering to be quite a good backup system for those on a budget / and on the move.

 

I have a 9.5mm 60GB IBM laptop hard drive sitting inside a Cooldisk USB Hard Disk Box (box was picked up on ebay for about $20.. nice aluminium case - quite sturdy.) Transfer rate for USB 2 is 480MB/s which isn't too bad depending on how much work you plan to backup!

 

Whole thing is about the size of a wallet (minus the cable) so easy to take it off-site to a secure bunker if you expect someone to blow up your house while your out for the day.

 

I have a folder on my HD that contains my important info.. and I just copy that whole folder over when Ive done what I consider to be a good amount of work worth backing-up.

 

For me, this is better than burning CD's all the time.

[bigcahunak]

Hi Sawyer and all.

After being in the same situation a couple of times, and after buying stuff -> throwing stuff -> and buying more stuff again, here is what I learned:

First, if its only one machine its completely different than a network. But, since you were talking about External HDD I'd assume you are talking about backing up a single machine.

Raid: why? Its extremely expensive for your needs, and has the same risks (stolen, house on fire...)

DVDR: Of site wise, it makes more sence. Method wise it devides to 2: Imaging (ghost, Acronis) and regular backup burning. So DVDR for backing up is the same as CDR only bigger. The problem with it is that no matter what method you use its not happening automatic. Ghost is a great product, but not for work backup; its good for system backup and restoring. I use it after installing a machine so Its easy to go back to a clean version of your OS (with or without drivers, SPs and other programs installed) and BTW ghost also works with other HDDs or network so it doesn't have to be a CD nor DVD burning (just a note). As for regular backing up with DVD/CD-R its still annoying, and most important it has to count on us to operate it.

 

I think that your initial thought was the best for you - get a good external USB 2.0 HDD and use a backuping program (a simple and ceap one) BTW there is a builtin one in Windows (ntbackup.exe - Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> system tools -> backup) The initial first full backup would be big (depending on your files) but from there on its either differential or incremental addition, so backup is fast and you still have all versions of your older files.

That way you have NO restarts to perform, and you don't need to manually select what have been change. You either set it up to run every day at a specific hour, or once you click on the button.

Once in six months I clean my projects folder - burn older project and remove them from my machine (to ease on backup size), burn the backed up files from the USB HDD, clean and defrag the USB HDD and start all over again - new full backup and incremental/differential following...

 

I still use ghost and I still burn CDs but not for live projects daily backup, so I think that if you don't need the DVD burner (to burn reall DVD movies) then you probably don't need it for anything else (not just yet...)

And don't even think of a tape.. yack..

 

was that a short enough answer? :ebiggrin: hope it helps you or anyone else.

[plastic]

why raid if the house can burn down?

because i don't except the house to burn down.

but i definitely expect the harddrives to die.

the question is not IF they die, but WHEN.

i may be a bit biased, because of the ibm deathstar thing. (5 of 6 drives or something had bad blocks, and two of them completely died without warning, headcrash)

to some extent that also happened with seagate and maxtor drives.

right now i expect good ide drives to operate for maybe 4 years. with a raid-1 system there is no interruption if one drive fails, and i can easily replace drives without too much hassle. (it takes a few hours for the controller to mirror the data to a new drive, but its no problem to operate with a single drive until there is time to rebuild the array)

[Jeff Mottle]

I'll throw my 2 cents in. I tried Ghost a while back but it would not recognize my external UBS devices so I bought Acronis True Image and all I have to say is that it rocks! Last night I mirrored 80GB of information on 2 drives in less than 2 hours and it compresses into less than 8GB. The nice thing about Acronis is that it can do mirror without a reboot and while in Windows. When you want to access a volume or any particular file, your just mount it to a drive letter and navigate to the files you want. Like any backup method that writes a single file, you are suseptable to losing the entire volume if it writes to a bad sector, but you can break the file into chunks and burn them to DVD too. 2 DVDs for my entire file system, programs, and OS. Nice! One of these days I have to start taking stuff off site....

 

PS I used to use the built in utility in windows, but the file sizes are vituall the same as the original file size and it's SLOOOOOOOOOW.

[Sawyer]

Thanks all. I think I will still look into the external hd. Jeff that Acronis True Image sounds like a good product. Sounds like Western Digital is still the top name. And the $ I would save from not burning dvds I could buy a new hd in about a year.

 

I like the raid option really sounds like THE way to go. Redundancy in back ups is a necessity. But I have so many things on my wish list that most will have to be compromises. orangesad

 

But that is life.

 

What I want is to just start renting computers. I would buy the hd and that is it then every 18 months I trade in my old unit for a new faster one. But that is another issue. :ngesmile: