Backing up my computer
- Thread starter vraiblonde
- Start date
ylexot
Super Genius
Just get a regular hard drive with an ATA-100 or ATA-133 interface (the most common and cheapest) and an external case hard drive case with a USB interface. They are extremely easy to make. I like either www.tigerdirect.com or www.newegg.com for computer gear. I also prefer Seagate or Hitachi hard drives.
itsbob
I bowl overhand
Easiest way to do a backup on a computer is to buy a motherboard capable of RAID. You have two HD's that are both mirrored.. if one fails you replace it, and you still have your total system. Depending on how important your data is, you can have it across two or more drives.. and the level of RAID depends on how much data is recoverd in case of catastrophic failure. NOW for a true back-up, fire loss prevention etc.. you want to do a ghost drive, and store the back up somewhere else. You can actually ghost a HD by buying an internal drive, setting it up as a slave, and making a ghost (complete copy) of the Master drive.
No ####. Now if I could have that again, in English this time...DoWhat said:
I think I'll do what Kwillia suggested and get a USB backer upper thingie. Before I order it, does anyone have reasons why this isn't the way to go? I need something simple and kennedy-proof.
kwillia
n/a
I just walked over and spoke to my NT sys admin guy. He said it is that simple. Once you connect the Exteral backer upper thingie to your PC with the connector thingy that comes with the USB, your PC will recognize it as an external drive just as it recognizes your A: drive or E: drive. You then simplay copy files from C: to the new external drive... whallaa...vraiblonde said:No ####. Now if I could have that again, in English this time...
I think I'll do what Kwillia suggested and get a USB backer upper thingie. Before I order it, does anyone have reasons why this isn't the way to go? I need something simple and kennedy-proof.
itsbob
I bowl overhand
I can't remember the name of the software, but it used to come with the ZIP drives.. AUTO-SYNCH's any new documents, pictures etc.. You tell it what folders to watch, and any changes made to files in those folders are automatically added, and any new files produced are automatically added to your back-up drive. You don't have to do anything except make sure you save everything to the folders you specify.kwillia said:I just walked over and spoke to my NT sys admin guy. He said it is that simple. Once you connect the Exteral backer upper thingie to your PC with the connector thingy that comes with the USB, your PC will recognize it as an external drive just as it recognizes your A: drive or E: drive. You then simplay copy files from C: to the new external drive... whallaa...
itsbob
I bowl overhand
And to explain my first post.. the surest way of a COMPLETE back up, data, system files AND operationg system is to set your computer in RAID 0 (Zero). You would have two hard drives inside your computer, and each is an exact copy of the other, if one fails the operating system switches to using only the good one. This gives you time to buy and replace the HD that went bad, when you insert the new blank drive, it again mirrors the surving drive. You always have TWO copies of your entire system, updated simultaneously. No fear of "My system went down and I haven't backed it up in two weeks"
There are multiple levels of RAID, depending on what you want to accomplish. Some gamers like RAID (can't remember if it's 3 or 4) but it Stripes the data between two or more drives.. while it's reading data from one drive, it's searching the next drive for the next peice of data, improving latency times, making exceptional speed improvements, getting rid of game lag. A computer with a single drive goes back and forth from reading, writing, and searching for data. When you talk about server farms, their drives are set up in RAID to prevent data loss. They could have for example, 20 hard drives, if one goes bad they can swap out the bad drive with a new drive with no loss of data, or loss of network uptime. You have redundancy shared beween all 20 drives.
My last motherboard came with SATA RAID where I could use normal HD's that you can buy at WalMart, plug an adaptor into the back of them and walla, I have RAID on my home computer. The mother board was no more expensive then any other.
There are multiple levels of RAID, depending on what you want to accomplish. Some gamers like RAID (can't remember if it's 3 or 4) but it Stripes the data between two or more drives.. while it's reading data from one drive, it's searching the next drive for the next peice of data, improving latency times, making exceptional speed improvements, getting rid of game lag. A computer with a single drive goes back and forth from reading, writing, and searching for data. When you talk about server farms, their drives are set up in RAID to prevent data loss. They could have for example, 20 hard drives, if one goes bad they can swap out the bad drive with a new drive with no loss of data, or loss of network uptime. You have redundancy shared beween all 20 drives.
My last motherboard came with SATA RAID where I could use normal HD's that you can buy at WalMart, plug an adaptor into the back of them and walla, I have RAID on my home computer. The mother board was no more expensive then any other.
raid
RAID0 (mirroring) works great, but before you get that specific you gotta define 1) what kind of failure you're trying to overcome and 2) how fast you want to be back online.
If someone pours coke or coffee on your computer (or it gets submerged, or burned), then having a second disk (a la RAID0) isn't much good; you'll just have two soggy, or burned, or whatever disks! To mitigate complete failure of the computer, get an external USB drive. It's cheap and intuitive. Probably your best bet for typical, residential backup chores.
It lets you do one more thing -- you can now mitigate the possibility of your house burning down (or otherwise being destroyed). You can back-up to the USB disk and take it somewhere else (don't leave it in the car!). Bring it home once a week (or whatever makes you happy) and update it.
Another good alternative is to get a network attached storage (NAS) device. Look at Quantum and Iomega; they make nice ones. I've got a 1Tb Quantum at work and I love it. You can back up a whole pile (or houseful or officeful) of computers to a big NAS device. If the computer goes up in smoke, at least you've got the data on a different box. Better yet, put the NAS device somewhere else (Mom&Dad's, Brother's, Sister's, Office) where there's broadband and do your backups across the network at 03:00am when you're sleeping. Now you've still got your data even if the house gets zapped!
For disk failure, RAID0 (mirroring) works great and you can continue operating through the failure, so the outage is limited to the time it takes to shut the system down and install a replacement drive (some systems can do it on the fly = hot-swap). RAID5 (striping) works great, too and lets you use more of the disk space you pay for, but you take a performance hit (although typical users would never notice). Still, RAID arrays are not cheap as they're generally built on SCSI disks. You can build a Linux box with a bunch of old IDE drives in it and run Linux RAID to make a cheap NAS box. I've got two 300Gb drives that I'll put in an ancient PC in the basement and have a nice backup box and a home for all my digital music.
It's all about how much trouble and money you're willing to expend to protect your data. Ask yourself how important it is. I've got a dead hard disk (not backed up anywhere) with years of digital pics of my kids on it in my desk drawer; the estimate was $2,000 to pull it all off, which I'll pay one day. I'll never let that happen again!
Thanks for the info on the backup software. I've been using SyncBackSE from www.2brightsparks.com and I love it. It's cheap and really, really powerful; lots of options to make it do precisely what you want.
Like I said up top -- get an external USB drive -- cheap, easy, portable, and probably good for 99% of what the typical user needs.
Good luck!
CAE
RAID0 (mirroring) works great, but before you get that specific you gotta define 1) what kind of failure you're trying to overcome and 2) how fast you want to be back online.
If someone pours coke or coffee on your computer (or it gets submerged, or burned), then having a second disk (a la RAID0) isn't much good; you'll just have two soggy, or burned, or whatever disks! To mitigate complete failure of the computer, get an external USB drive. It's cheap and intuitive. Probably your best bet for typical, residential backup chores.
It lets you do one more thing -- you can now mitigate the possibility of your house burning down (or otherwise being destroyed). You can back-up to the USB disk and take it somewhere else (don't leave it in the car!). Bring it home once a week (or whatever makes you happy) and update it.
Another good alternative is to get a network attached storage (NAS) device. Look at Quantum and Iomega; they make nice ones. I've got a 1Tb Quantum at work and I love it. You can back up a whole pile (or houseful or officeful) of computers to a big NAS device. If the computer goes up in smoke, at least you've got the data on a different box. Better yet, put the NAS device somewhere else (Mom&Dad's, Brother's, Sister's, Office) where there's broadband and do your backups across the network at 03:00am when you're sleeping. Now you've still got your data even if the house gets zapped!
For disk failure, RAID0 (mirroring) works great and you can continue operating through the failure, so the outage is limited to the time it takes to shut the system down and install a replacement drive (some systems can do it on the fly = hot-swap). RAID5 (striping) works great, too and lets you use more of the disk space you pay for, but you take a performance hit (although typical users would never notice). Still, RAID arrays are not cheap as they're generally built on SCSI disks. You can build a Linux box with a bunch of old IDE drives in it and run Linux RAID to make a cheap NAS box. I've got two 300Gb drives that I'll put in an ancient PC in the basement and have a nice backup box and a home for all my digital music.
It's all about how much trouble and money you're willing to expend to protect your data. Ask yourself how important it is. I've got a dead hard disk (not backed up anywhere) with years of digital pics of my kids on it in my desk drawer; the estimate was $2,000 to pull it all off, which I'll pay one day. I'll never let that happen again!
Thanks for the info on the backup software. I've been using SyncBackSE from www.2brightsparks.com and I love it. It's cheap and really, really powerful; lots of options to make it do precisely what you want.
Like I said up top -- get an external USB drive -- cheap, easy, portable, and probably good for 99% of what the typical user needs.
Good luck!
CAE
DD214
Member
I've been using this software since the name Second Copy 2000 sounded futuristic, and it has never failed me. I'm all about giving free software a shot, but if I'm going to recommend a product to someone, I will only do so if I know the product works as advertised. I will definitely try out some of the apps on the page you linked though. Free is good.ylexot said:
I use Second Copy along with this drive (http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=100745-2), and it works like a charm. I even have it set so that after it finishes the computers on my home network, it performs a backup on about 3 dozen websites/MySQL databases via ftp on a nightly basis.
Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that all of this is necessary.
bcp
In My Opinion
Norton makes a software program by the name of GHOST.
GHOST will make an exact image of your system, compress it then back it up on the CD drive.
if a problem with the system requires you to rebuild the drive, GHOST can be rerun from a startup disk (in drive A) and in about 15 minutes your system is back exactly as it was before the problem.
you can also make supplemental backups of specific data areas to be restored.
so lets say you create the image of your drive today, and over the next month or so you add a few hundred photos. you backed up the photos with an image
the system crashes.
Use the first backup to reimage the system.
then run the second backup to bring the photo data file back to date.
GHOST can also be used on networks.
you can have one system with an image on it, and the other systems can pull the image down directly from that main system over the network.
GHOST will make an exact image of your system, compress it then back it up on the CD drive.
if a problem with the system requires you to rebuild the drive, GHOST can be rerun from a startup disk (in drive A) and in about 15 minutes your system is back exactly as it was before the problem.
you can also make supplemental backups of specific data areas to be restored.
so lets say you create the image of your drive today, and over the next month or so you add a few hundred photos. you backed up the photos with an image
the system crashes.
Use the first backup to reimage the system.
then run the second backup to bring the photo data file back to date.
GHOST can also be used on networks.
you can have one system with an image on it, and the other systems can pull the image down directly from that main system over the network.
itsbob said:
I think you guys got your raid numbers backwards. RAID 0 is disk striping. Half the data is sent to each of two hard drives to increase performance. With raid 0, if you loose either hard drive, you loose all you data. So risk is increased. Raid 1 is disk mirroring. Where each hard drive is an exact copy of the other. Raid 2 and above are all more complex combinations of disk striping and disk mirroring.
http://www.gtweb.net/RAID_desc.html
I'm currently using raid 0 on my computer for the performance gain. I have two 10,000 rpm 36.7GB rator drives on sata 150 channels in raid 0 configuration.
I would go with raid 1 if I was concerned about disk failure. Raid 2 and above are more for servers where you have a large number of hard drives.
The advantage of raid 1 over an external usb drive is that raid gives real time backup instead of a periodic drive backup. Its mainly a protection against mechanical failure though, since any data corruption issues that exist on one drive will just be copied to the other in real time.
I usually don't bother with whole disk backup though. It may save on restore time, but your also backing up any viruses, spyware, and corrupt data which happens to be on your computer. A fresh install of any software is alot safer solution. So I pretty much just backup my personnal files (pictures, music, documents, saved games, etc).
