Need help on back up help and hardware suggestions........

[littleoldme]

Hi

I currently have a system I am very happy with which has a 150gig WD raptor HD

What I want advice on is a back up drive........

I don't just want a drive I can copy files from my main drive......... I want a drive which I can totally mirror my current disk in case I get a virus or my drive fails.

So if my current drive fails I can copy the mirror image from the back up drive to a new drive and be up and running pretty quickly.

Obviously I don't want to do it in "real time" as a virus/error would also be transfered.

Can anyone suggest some hard/set up that I could back up my current disk say once a week.

I dont mind doing it manually overnight.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[littleoldme]

As a follow up question...........

I am new to SSD HD's......... how much faster are they than the 150G Raptor for a large database application such as PostgreSQL ? (60 GB database)

 

[pjkenned]

If you are running Vista or Windows 7, you can easily setup a nightly scheduled backup to a connected drive. One you get the drive and plug it in, just go to the control panel and backup/ restore center. Heck, buy a 1TB drive and keep a week's worth of images so you have multiple restore points. Total cost <$100.

If you want something more substantial you could always go the NAS route, but that is going to start in the $350 range.

SSD's are fast, much faster than a 150GB raptor. How hard are you hitting that database though? SSD's are still pretty expensive but do offer great performance.

 

[littleoldme]

Thanks for the tips

I am running XP sp3

how do a transfer a disk image to another drive?

Is there some software that can do that......... and also restore it to a new drive if the current one fails?

 

[jimhsu]

What is the read/write distribution on that database? OLTP or DSS?

(Good) SSDs do especially well with a high read to write ratio with heavy, concurrent OLTP. For other usage cases, performance is suboptimal but still likely outperforms hard drive arrays on a cost basis.

I had a whole "database on SSD" article somewhere .. can't find it now.