Testing a new hard drive, recommended setup help

[azdaren]

My movies/music/pics have grown to about 1.2 tb. I purchased 2 2tb wd drives. 1 as my main storage, 1 as the backup. Within 2 days my main storage drive started giving me problems (slow moving files, some files could not be copied or moved) and when backing up with Acronis got a few errors reading sectors. This scared me as I have spent way too much time in metadata land on music and movies.

My first question is, what is the best way to test these drives before I use them?

Second question is, what is the best way to handle the backup of my main 2tb storage drive? I probably add or make changes to files on the storage drive daily. I usually just use Acronis to clone the disk every week or so, but it seems there has to be a better/faster/less hands on solution out there.

Thanks for the help!

 

[alaricljs]

A free option for question 2: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

 

[C1]

Im sure there will be a whole bunch of recommendations, but mine are:

- You could use SeaTools to evaluate any new drive
- Do an automated differential backup daily to a second dedicated drive using Acronis

Also, didnt your WDs come with backup software? I know my Hitachi's did.

 

[azdaren]

Im sure there will be a whole bunch of recommendations, but mine are:

- You could use SeaTools to evaluate any new drive
- Do an automated differential backup daily to a second dedicated drive using Acronis

Also, didnt your WDs come with backup software? I know my Hitachi's did.

Thanks for the quick replies. I just bought bare drives so I didnt receive any b/u software.

What is an automated differential backup? Is that something I can schedule in Acronis and it only updates any changes made to the main drive on the b/u drive?

Thanks,

 

[alaricljs]

Yes, automated means scheduled.

I don't know how Acronis stores "backups" normally a backup is written to a "container" whether that be a tape(set) or file(set), not a clone/mirror of the original filesystem on a new disk.

To create a differential backup the software starts by creating a full backup and then when the next backup occurs it backs only the data/files that have changed. Depending on software features you could then do a differential backup the next time against the previous differential. Usually differentials are only created against a full backup, so you end up with this:

Full backup 1/1/10 - all data
differential 1/2/10 - all changes since 1/1/10
differential 1/3/10 - all changes since 1/1/10
differential 1/4/10 - all changes since 1/1/10


Unison on the other hand is meant to synchronize the contents of 2 different filesystems whether they be on the same machine or different machines.

 

[azdaren]

I have used Acronis to do a backup to another drive. The backup is called Mybackup1.tib. Is this a file that only Acronis will be able to read? And how do I trust that the backup is good?

I really like the idea of having an exact duplicate of all the folders so I can see for myself that I have a working backup.

Am I being paranoid?

 

[alaricljs]

Yes, only Acronis can read that. You have to either trust the backup software did it's job or not. I'm sure you could run some validation thing in Acronis against it if you wanted. It's only paranoia until the worst happens.

 

[Emulex]

veeam let's you create a sandbox and boot off the backup files (including the differentials) without extracting the backup files. I believe this is the future of desktop back. I use it to boot 20 servers in a sandbox and verify my backups are 100% valid. I can also extract data in the sandbox quite easily and pick it out.

Perhaps acronis will add that feature soon. Backups are useless if you don't TEST them regularily.