Suggestion on Backup Method
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Thread: Suggestion on Backup Method

  1. #1
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    Suggestion on Backup Method

    I've gotten a bit stung in the last couple of days. Before formatting a customers computer in order to reinstall Windows, I did two forms of backups. One, a ghost image, and the other a files and folders backup using Acronis to my Hard Disk which I generally use only for backing up customers computers when the need arises. The backup went fine. When I tried moving the files back from my hard disk to his, my hard drive started making purring sounds, and it was not being recognized by BIOS. Dead hard drive, and along with it my customers files. I've sent it off to a company that specializes in restoring data in these types of cases, waiting to hear how much damage was done and how much it will cost to recover. I know these things can be extremely expensive, and I will obviously have to handle the bill.
    I do not want this to happen again in the future, so I will have to take precautionary measures, which means a better and more professional method of backing up customers important data.
    I have thought of two solutions, and would like to hear your opinions.

    1. Backing up data to a Raid 1 (Image) setup. This will give me fault tolerance should one of the hard disks die. As far as I know, I won't need anything else besides 2 new hard disks (say 320GB, each costing $108) and an IDE controller with RAID. If I am wrong, please correct me. This shouldn't be too expensive considering the other option.

    2. Tape Backup, perhaps more reliable but a lot more expensive. The device itself would cost at least $500 and up and includes about 5 tapes of 72GB. It will cost more to get more capacity. This method is expensive and if the tape breaks, the data is gone. It is probably more reliable than a hard disk.

    Your thoughts?

  2. #2
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    Tape Backup:

    Even less reliable than backup to hard disk, and for a high quality system also more expensive.

    Better option:

    Backup to hard disk, then create CD/DVD's with the files. If you really want to test the backup, have a spare hard drive available for a test restore. This method is cheaper and easier than either tape or RAID.

  3. #3
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    We are talking about backing up someone's hard drive. The minimum amount of space would be 40GB and up. Too big to burn unto a DVD.

  4. #4
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    One small thought: I always Copy n Paste versus Cut or Move files. Once I'm sure the files made it to the target drive I delete from the source.
    If you're happy and you know it......it's your meds.

  5. #5
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    I don't copy & paste for reasons I mentioned in this thread, instead I use Ghost for imaging the whole HD and Acronis for copying all the files and folders.
    The weird thing about this situation is that everything worked fine up until the point I had to move the files back to the original HD. The original backup went smoothly and there were no problems with the HD. It was the day after I had ghosted it that it stopped working. And at that point, I had already formated the customers HD and reinstalled Windows.

  6. #6
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    I'd take a belt and braces approach. In your case RAID 1 would be a good plan, though it still has some limitations. RAID 5 would be ideal, but only a few mobos have that built in, and you will need 3 hard drives (though you'll be able to use the combined capacity of two of them. But I would also invest in an external drive or two, and back up the data to that as well.
    Nick.

  7. #7
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    Interesting you mentioned Raid 5. Besides having to get a third hard, and probably a special Raid card for SCSI drives, what advantage would I have using Raid 5 over 1? The outcome looks the same to me only RAID 5 would be more expensive and more difficult to implement.
    In RAID 1, I would buy 2 hard drives and a PCI SATA with RAID card (which I already have), if one HD fails, I can use the other one, the data would remain and I would have to replace the first one.
    With RAID 5, I'd have to get 3 drives. If one would fail, I'd still have the data and would have to replace the broken HD.
    So in both scenarious, as far as I can see, I keep the data and have to replace one hard drive. The one main advantage of using RAID 5 would be that it would be faster to read and write than in RAID 1.
    I'm no expert on RAID so correct me if I am wrong. What are the limitations of RAID 1 that you mentioned?

  8. #8
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    The biggest limitation of raid 1 is the hardware overhead.

    With raid 1 the overhead is half the drives in the array. For each drive in the array another is used for overhead or 50%.

    With raid 5 the overhead is 1/n where n = the number of drives in the array. On a raid 5 array with the maximum of 15 drives, the overhead is 1/15 or 6⅔%. In this case raid 1 hardware costs about 7½ times the cost of raid 5 hardware for the same amount of user storage.

    About backup, tape is the most economical and flexible.

    I used 80GB tape, DLT, for backup since I retired. I kept daily, monthly quarterly and annual rotations. I also used tape to store my photo and film collection on. I'm using the past tense because my drive finally wore out after more than 10 years' use. I have yet to replace it. I migrated most of my photo and film collection to DVD along with some of my family records that dated back to the 1800's. I still have about 8TB of backup on DLT.

  9. #9
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    Lemme add something to the equation that I forgot to mention and which may be important.
    The hard drives (whether Raid 1 or 5) is not intended to be the system hard drive. Rather I will have a separate hard drive that will be the system drive. The RAID drives will be for occasional backups of customers files only. It won't be used for anything else.
    ua549, your equation makes sense, but it sounds like it would be more relevant in a storage or file server where the RAID array would come into use on a regular basis. This is not the case here, as it will only be used for occasional back of customer computers.
    Having said that, is there a technical problem with using RAID 1 (or 5) as I just mentioned?

  10. #10
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    Use raid 1 if you have a big enough pair of identical drives.
    Avoid soft raid. Use a hardware raid controller.

  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by ua549
    Use raid 1 if you have a big enough pair of identical drives.
    Avoid soft raid. Use a hardware raid controller.
    I plan on getting two 320GB drives. That should be big enough. In any case, the data on it gets erased on a regular basis.
    As for my previous question, is there a problem with making the RAID array as a secondary setup and having another HD as the master disk?

  12. #12
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    What do you mean by "master disk"?

    If you mean the Windows boot volume and/or system volume, there are no issues. Keep those functions separate on their own drive (c:). SATA drives do not use a master/slave setup. They have one cable per drive. SCSI puts all drives on a single cable and each drive is assigned a bus address. Master/slave is strictly an IDE concept. Many mobos have raid 1 built into the onboard drive controllers. Make the array drive d:.

  13. #13
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    By Master I meant Windows boot volume. The RAID hd's will be SATA. So you are saying there is no problem with having the single hard drive as the Windows system? How would I go about doing that? Install the Windows system HD first and then the RAID?
    The motherboard is an older Asus mobo without built in RAID. I'll be using a PCI SATA controller with RAID.

  14. #14
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    Load the OS first, then build the raid array.

  15. #15
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    Great, thanks!

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