Windows XP: Backup Strategy
137 Gig Limit handled...
by HarleyUltraClassic - 2/18/06 7:07 AM In reply to: 137 Gig Limit by tonyny77I've since learned two things: (obviously, there has to be hundreds more, right?)
WinXP SP1 will install Registry keys to circumvent the 137 gig barrier, or...
The MaxBlast utility (if you own a Maxtor drive) will do the same for the user.
BTW, let me reiterate something regarding my External Drive...the only problem was I could not partition & format the drive and retain that 'training.' After 11 attempts, I would lose the partitioning and the drive would become 'Unallocated' again and again. I blamed the USB cable for that failure and moved on to another solution.
I moved my Maxtor 160gig HDD to my PC and formatted the disk using the IDE cable (rather than the USB cable connecting the External HDD) and everything remained stable. The Maxtor drive was then returned to the External Case and put into service.
AFter some days of observation, the drive appears to be normal again. I've Ghosted my Slave Drive data to the External Maxtor and it's remained intact after numerous reboots and turning the USB External Drive off and on.
Wasn't sure I made that clear after some further reading of the thread...
Regards,
Jan
Free Utility that is reliable and works great for backups!
by rlessmue - 2/17/06 9:52 AM In reply to: Backup Strategy by tonyny77The BEST back-up I now use is a system that has 2 drives that are the same size - with a mirror of each other. I backup from one drive to the other (they happen to be the same size 160G). My drives are mounted on a "mobile rack", which means - when I turn the power off, I can slide out the drive that is in the front of my tower, and slide another drive in its' place (no cable swapping here!). I currently have 4 drives that go between the 2 "mobile rack" slots. Two drives are "system" drives, and the other two drives are "non-system" drives. When I backup a "system drive" I place both system drives in my "mobile rack" slots and boot-up. When I get to the windows desktop I launch the software called MaxBlast 4. This software runs in a windows enviroment with out any problems. When I finish backing up my current running system to my backup drive, I power down and remove -the drive of the system that I was using- and boot from the system I just backed-up (by it's self). (I also re-verify that my old system still works too, by booting it up by it's self again). I have used tapes in the past, used Ghost, DOS, but this is the best system I have come up with. It is: 1)Fast, 2)Reliable, 3)Low cost and 4)Safe & Secure.
Cheers,
Robert
Here is the link to the download:
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxtor/menuitem.3c67e325e0a6b1f6294198b091346068/?channelpath=/en_us/Support/Software%20Downloads/All%20Downloads&downloadID=57
Hmmm, Interesting
by tonyny77 - 2/17/06 5:32 PM In reply to: Free Utility that is reliable and works great for backups! by rlessmueRobert,
I'm going to keep track of your idea. The main reason why is the Maxtor utility you referred to.
I need to follow up more with Maxtor because I am fairly confident that my external Maxtor USB drive is not dead. If you carefully read my original post, you noticed that I was happily using my external Maxtor USB drive to perform my backups. Then, one day after doing a Windows update, I started getting these Delayed Write Failed errors on the Maxtor drive, which I had never heard of before. Checking the Internet revealed that it's happening ALL OVER the place.
Thinking I could quickly resolve the problem by contacting Maxtor tech support, I went straight to them. However, despite two contacts, basically, all they said was to re-install the drive.
Let me tell you ... I do NOT like the manual that came with the Maxtor drive and the install does not work as the manual states. FURTHERMORE, as best as I can determine, this Maxtor drive requires special drivers, not the built-in drivers coming with Windows XP. That makes it a more risky proposition, in my opinion.
But getting back to my point, I will have to further research the matter of my Maxtor drive on my own. Tech support wasn't helpful.
Thanks for the tip.
Tony
small system approach
by GLNC - 2/17/06 10:28 AM In reply to: Backup Strategy by tonyny77Windows XP SP2
I use a SATA RAID 1 mirror, keeping a duplicate of everything on the fly, along with a partition dedicated to holding working partition image backups produced by Acronis True Image, which are then copied to DVD's on
occaision.
For larger scale development work additional hard disks instead of partitions would be used instead of optical media. With SATA it makes little difference whether internal or external -- the sata connector is brought outside as another kind of external interface, with supporting connector hardware.
USB 2.0 connections can be used just as well.
Image backups to optical media is too slow for periodic entire partition images.
Symantec tech support reported to me none of Symantec's products will work with a RAID type 1 mirror system, and referred me to customer service for resolution. Norton Ghost would not work.
The Serial ATA drives are hot pluggable, for use in large servers. Can help with various backup strategies as well.
Also tried Stompsoft backup software, was not as sophisticated as Acronis. And they did not pay an advertised rebate.
Acronis has a Linux based boot-up disk generated on the system with a backup and restore environment compatible with Windows and hardware. It can also work as a plug-in for the BartPE maintenance environment boot system. It cannot by itself write to DVD's, but can read them and create the requisite burn files for multidisk sets. All features must be tested before use, as the product is being developed with user testing only, it seems. Daily revisions. But the basics have been accomplished, and it is priced accordingly.
It supports an optional stealthed kind of backup partition outside the OS defined disk usage, but without much dynamic maintenance -- useful mainly for an initial copy of the OS, similar to store delivered machines.
A standard partition is accessible to all transfer and maintenance software of interest, but it is more visible to malicious software.
Backup features of Nero burning software were found completely useless, and tech support was absent. Acronis gives special attention to the open-files backup problem, and can hot backup a running OS partition (you could backup from the bootable environment, but it isn't necessary).
Because of integration of applications with the operating system, it is necesssary to back up the entire OS and application code partition as a sector-by-sector image.
Incremental and differential backups of that kind are supported.
Backups of large application data might best be done with file based incremental backups. Job specific analysis seems required.
Symantec Goback and Mirrored drives
by rpb1 - 2/17/06 6:11 PM In reply to: small system approach by GLNCSymantec Goback and Mirrored drives
this does work on 32 bit systems, it will work on 64 bit computers using 32 bit Windows if you put in your boot.ini the following /Noexecute=AlwaysOff /NoPAE like this ....
[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=alwaysoff /NoPAE
(You may or may not need the /NOPae switch)
Very Nice, Thank You
by tonyny77 - 2/18/06 4:56 AM In reply to: small system approach by GLNCGLNC,
I wanted to say thanks ... thanks very much for such a detailed and well-written post.
You can be sure that my next system will have a disk controller that supports RAID. I haven't studied this option thoroughly, but for my needs, I think a simple mirror will take care of things very nicely.
I work at a certain Defense Department agency and even my fellow IT professionals often pay no attention to the possibility of losing a hard drive. When one of my bosses recently lost his laptop's hard drive, only then did they give a thought to protecting their data.
One of the things they considered was getting an external RAID, but this suggestion was later deemed to be overkill. In this particular case, the desktop systems they wanted to protect COULD afford to be down, which is not the same as saying that we didn't care about the data.
When we considered the external RAID that one team member recommended, I put the question to my boss this way: Do you want to be sure your system is ALWAYS available without interruption (which is more costly, of course), or can we afford to be down for a little while as restore operations are being performed? For these non-production systems, we went with the latter.
So the solution they settled on was an external Iomega drive. We went with the Iomega drive because for our Win2K environment, the Iomega was "plug & play," meaning that Win2K's built-in drivers were all we needed.
Thanks again, GLNC. I appreciate your message.
Tony
backup strategy
by raptor8 - 2/17/06 1:31 PM In reply to: Backup Strategy by tonyny77Hey bud, any backup strategy should not include a Maxtor product! I was dumb enuf to buy two of their external hard dives and guess what? they both committed suicide and took thousands of photos with them. You couldnt GIVE me a maxtor product now! I too am currently using an internal drive as a backup at least until I can find a very highly rated external drive.
iNTERNAL BACKUP
by psbaud - 2/17/06 3:40 PM In reply to: backup strategy by raptor8I use an extra internal hard drive and once a month I
reformat the back up drive as the new boot drive. I do
this before going to work or at night before going to bed. After it is complete I just disconnect the power to
this drive until I want to format again.
I'd Consider a Change
by tonyny77 - 2/18/06 5:21 AM In reply to: iNTERNAL BACKUP by psbaudPSBaud,
I like the simplicity of your approach. But I hope I haven't misunderstood what you said.
Don't forget the possibility of your hard drive failing in the middle of one of your backups. I mean, if you're reformatting and re-copying to the same drive all the time, what will you have if your main drive fails in the middle of one of these backups? Your main drive will be dead and your backup will be incomplete.
I would slightly modify your approach by using the Windows Backup Wizard or getting some other backup software you might prefer. Either of these approaches will backup your system to a FILE and you'd be able to save multiple versions, if you like. In this way, if one file somehow got corrupted, at least you'd still have another slightly older version to count on.
Do you agree? Perhaps I misunderstood you.
Tony
No Maxtor For Me, Either
by tonyny77 - 2/18/06 5:08 AM In reply to: backup strategy by raptor8Raptor8,
I cannot disagree with you. I'm a little worried that my Maxtor is now a paper weight. I NEVER move or play with the thing; I've always treated it as if touching it might render it useless, but at present, it's dead in the water, as they say.
At the very least, if I ever get another external hard drive, I'll be SURE to get one that is "plug and play" for my OS. By getting a drive that doesn't require any additional special drivers, that's one critical point that you/I won't have to worry about.
In the case of my Maxtor USB One-Touch II, I'm disappointed in the manual. (1) The instruction path is not clear; (2) the install did not proceed as indicated by the instructions; (3) after starting to get delayed write failures, their tech support basically said to re-install; and (4) now I'm left wondering whether the drive is dead or I just have a driver issue of some kind.
Yes, you're right ... No Maxtor, for the time being.
Tony
Free online backup
by k4kyv - 2/17/06 4:55 PM In reply to: Backup Strategy by tonyny77If you have a document that you particularly don't want to lose, have you ever thought of using one of the free web-based e-mail services? I simply compose a message to myself and attach the file. If I need to retrieve the backup file, I click on the message and open the attachment.
Hotmail now allows subscribers to its free version 250 mb of storage space. I believe G-mail offers a gb.
I hear a lot of people complain about external hard drive failure. I wonder if the problem might be related to moving the drive while it is running. With the disc spinning at 7200 rpm or more, it is a very effective gyroscope. Physically move the drive even slightly, and the spinning disc wants to remain spinning in the same plane while the rest of the device shifts position. Since there is only a microscopic gap between the disk and the heads, it doesn't take much lateral pressure to force the head into physical contact with the disc and kaboom!
Free online backup and "Kaboom!"
by rgismondi - 2/17/06 7:32 PM In reply to: Free online backup by k4kyvGmail offers over 2 GB of storage, which is good for a backup of a backup.
Reading posts on several sites, it is clear that the external HDD failure rate is unexpectedly high. Since the main operational difference from internal drives is the possibility of movement of the drive, your human vs. gyroscopic force theory is the most plausible explanation. The directions commonly advise against movement of an operating drive; but, many do not read the instructions.
"Kaboom" is right!
~~Robert
You're ABSOLUTELY Correct!
by tonyny77 - 2/18/06 7:08 AM In reply to: Free online backup by k4kyvK4KYV,
I think EXACTLY as you do. I know MANY people who NEVER think twice about moving their PC (or external hard drive) while it's turned on. NNNOOOOO WAY, not me!
Yes, moving your PC's case or an external hard drive while they're turned on isn't likely to kill a hard drive ... not the first time, anyway, and maybe not the tenth time, either. But how many times can you do that and expect to get away with it? To me it's like leaving your wallet (or purse) unattended on a fast food restaurant table while you visit the rest room.
And I think your comparison to a gyroscope has some validity. Thanks for your post and leave those hard drives spinning in peace.
Tony
There is only one backup strategy
by DJW88 - 2/18/06 6:04 AM In reply to: Backup Strategy by tonyny77continuous, offsite, encrypted, and cheap...
www.connected.com
After initial one long backup, the backups happen automatically at the byte change level, which means you're only backing up files that have changes....
My Strategy
by zcaveman - 2/18/06 6:43 AM In reply to: Backup Strategy by tonyny77I keep an odd/even set of ReadWrite CDs for weekly backup and an odd/even set of ReadWrite CDs for Monthly backup. I have a BAT files that I execute every Monday to backup my volitile files a BAT File I execupte monthly for my not so volitile files. When the disks get full I start another series of disks.
Occasionally I read all of the bbackups to make sure that they are still readable.
I have saves myself several times by keeping the old backups and notwriting over them. In 2005 I was able to recover a file from 2001 that I thought was gone.
Bill
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