Needed: *SERIOUS* Hard Disk Back-Up Apps & Tools

[foodfightr]

Ok so I just built a whole new system for my father that has three hard drives. He has two of them running RAID1 and the third hard drive is for backups. He'd like to have it completely back-up the entire hard drive every night at midnight.

He can't decide if he'd like the third hard drive to look exactly like the raid drives and be accessible, or a ghost file that the system can use to restore from. Both would be ideal, please let me know what you reccomend.

Also: Apparently Norton Ghost 10 has changed significantly from Norton Ghost 9 and there is some level of controversy as to how useful these changes were. Please elaborate if possible!

 

[DaveSimmons]

If the information is so important, you should be thinking of a tape drive and pile of tapes, or a stack of external drives to rotate and keep off-site.

With all three drives fixed inside the machine, he is not protected from fire, gas leak, flood, power surge, exploding power supply, faulty drive controller, theft, and raccoons.

We had a break in and hardware theft at my last job, though it was humans not the little furry guys.

PS - Acronis True Image is good software.

 

[foodfightr]

Haha, ok I'll admit I was being a little over dramatic about how important it is, but it is the most important aspect of the system. As for the questions though?

 

[DaveSimmons]

I'm serious about a backup that lives outside of the machine. Off-site is best of course but tapes or DVD-RWs or external HDs on a closet shelf protects you from everything that could destroy the PC itself.

Many retail HDs and tape drives come with backup software.

 

[drag]

Save to a tape or DVD backup. Something that is seperate from the computer and probably can be stored off site.

Like a data triag.. If he comes in the next morning and there was a fire, how much data and what sort of data could he loose and still be able to run the business and serve their customers?

If the computer dissappeered one evening for some reason (fire, electrical overload, theft) would that have a significant impact? How would you go about recovering the information? How much is the business worth? Could they afford shutting down for 2 days or a week to rebuild lost information and what if the information can't be rebuilt and is lost forever?

Sometimes it's a big deal, sometimes it's not so much a big deal.

Then it's usefull to test the recovery. If your storing off-site backups see how well the restore goes when you lost all your computers and all your software registration information and media and you'd have to start over with nothing but your backups and some new PCs from Office Depot or whatever.

Were I work at also had a buglery.. not to much stolen, but had a few smashed machines. Also had a cooling failure (on a different occasion) at night were one important server had 5 disks in a 10 disk RAID array fail (in a impressive manner) at the same time. Full data loss. Backups were fairly useless also because at the time they backed up just the database files and in order to restore them they needed the passwords for the files.. which was only known by one person... who just happenned to be on a beginning of a week-long cruise and they had no way to reach her. On that database server though had no information that was not present in other forms on other computers.. so rebuilding it wasn't to bad.. it's just there was 2 days were no customers could make orders online...

crazy stuff does happen.

 

[spherrod]

You should definitely consider an off-site backup - at some point you will be very grateful that you did.

 

[Cheetah8799]

For a less expensive off-site solution, I believe there is a command-line way to burn DVD and CDs with Nero. You could write some batch file scripts to burn a DVD once a week or so, then take the new DVD off-site. You would have to manually load the fresh DVD, but it's doable I think.


edit: for doing backups to your 3rd hard drive, you can use the "msbackup" utility to schedule incremental and full backups on a regular basis. I don't think you can use that to backup to DVD though, only tape or hard drive. You'll want to read more on the specifics.

 

[EagleKeeper]

Get external drive (2-USB or 1-tape)

Backup the critical data (how and what is your choice).
After each backup, remove the media off site and return with the previous older backup.

Always backujp what you can not afford to loose.
It would be useful to also have a recoverable image incase the OS or normal operations of the disk become corrupted.