Ghosting/cloning a PC hard drive

Matthew

Matthew

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Matthew
Looking for some different options:

I have a piece of equipment that's run by an embedded PC (Win10). I'm looking for 2-3 different ways to keep a scheduled backup that's complete enough to be a fully bootable duplicate. Once a week, or maybe even once a month, will be sufficient.

I might be able to get a RAID 1 array inside the PC - it's an industrial PC that's designed specifically for embedded systems, so it has a small form factor and might not be able to support more than one internal HDD. I still need to get some detailed specs on that computer. I could probably add a second, external, HDD and use a cloning utility. I could probably do a few other things, too. I'm not the one that's making the specifics for this requirement, so I'm still trying to find out if the backup must be kept attached to the PC or will be saved offsite somewhere. I know that can make a difference. Possibly RAID 1 and another drive? Knowing what I do know, I am assuming this backup will have to be as automatic and behind the scenes as possible, with very little user input (so attaching an external drive, doing a backup, and then locking away that drive is probably not going to work). This equipment will not, ever, be attached to a network. It will remain a stand-alone system.
 
Clonezilla has been my backup solution for many years.

I really like Macrium Reflect and Mondo.
 
For cloning machines...

If clonezilla gets tripped up, Macrium always works.

Clonezilla gets grumpy about some UEFI setups.

I think Macrium paid version will let you schedule regular backups.

Problems with imaging:

- Maybe you just need one file back. Look into tools that can recover individual files from the larger backup or use two backup systems.

- On site / Off... you get the idea. Do both of them if they thing you’re protecting is worth money or significant time.

- Backups that aren’t tested aren’t backups. At least once yank the good drive and make darn sure you really can restore from it.

- Unrelated to this scenario probably but better careful nowadays with encrypted drives. The encryption usually needs to be bypassed to get a backup that’ll work on a different motherboard. TPM / Apple’s T2 chip — these key the drive to the board with that chip. Recovery gets slightly more complex. See : Backups that aren’t tested, aren’t backups. Including restoring to different hardware.
 
By the way RAID 1 saves you from disk failure (also needs to be tested!) but won’t save from the usual “someone deleted crap they shouldn’t have”.
 
Second clonezilla, we use it at work to back up and restore images all the time.
 
I'm thinking that this won't be an automatic, unattended, backup. Because this PC is controlling industrial equipment it will typically be shut off at the end of each shift. Someone will have to schedule maintenance down-times to do a backup. In this controller, there really isn't a need to do an hourly, daily, or possibly even weekly backup since little, if any, data will be changing. Once configured, calibrated, and backed up, there isn't much else to do. Maybe backup every month or two, or even maybe just a single backup. Some of this is TBD. But it does have to be a bootable copy so the backup drive can be swapped for a failed PC drive. Of course, what if the backup drive fails? We all know how that can go.
 
denverpilot said:
By the way RAID 1 saves you from disk failure (also needs to be tested!) but won’t save from the usual “someone deleted crap they shouldn’t have”.
Click to expand...
Important, very, very important question. I built backup systems and storage system software for years. They were almost always bought to recover fromthe "small meteor through the machine room" scenario, but they were used to fix the "Oh crap! Shouldn't have deleted THAT!" scenario.
 
jsstevens said:
Important, very, very important question. I built backup systems and storage system software for years. They were almost always bought to recover fromthe "small meteor through the machine room" scenario, but they were used to fix the "Oh crap! Shouldn't have deleted THAT!" scenario.
Click to expand...

Someone deleted an entire sub-company’s fileshare today. Again. Restored in a few minutes but I cranked the logging now because that’s twice.

Someone is getting hit with a clue bat about properly paying attention to what the frick they’re deleting the next time they do it.

(And yeah logging should have already been up but it wasn’t my call last time. Now I’m involved and annoyed. LOL)
 
Matthew said:
I'm thinking that this won't be an automatic, unattended, backup. Because this PC is controlling industrial equipment it will typically be shut off at the end of each shift. Someone will have to schedule maintenance down-times to do a backup. In this controller, there really isn't a need to do an hourly, daily, or possibly even weekly backup since little, if any, data will be changing. Once configured, calibrated, and backed up, there isn't much else to do. Maybe backup every month or two, or even maybe just a single backup. Some of this is TBD. But it does have to be a bootable copy so the backup drive can be swapped for a failed PC drive. Of course, what if the backup drive fails? We all know how that can go.
Click to expand...

Seems good for the casual “make an image every so often and keep it somewhere safe” method.

If the machine is USB3 capable a cheap SSD USB drive might work okay. Just a pain to shuck it to put it inside to boot from it later.

Best if there’s a way to reload enough of Winderz to then load Macrium, or better a bootable Clonezilla stick or Macrium stick can boot the thing far enough — then you can just restore from the USB to a new drive in the thing if it failed or the old drive if someone just wiped it by accident.

You probably knew all of that. :)
 
denverpilot said:
Seems good for the casual “make an image every so often and keep it somewhere safe” method.

If the machine is USB3 capable a cheap SSD USB drive might work okay. Just a pain to shuck it to put it inside to boot from it later.

Best if there’s a way to reload enough of Winderz to then load Macrium, or better a bootable Clonezilla stick or Macrium stick can boot the thing far enough — then you can just restore from the USB to a new drive in the thing if it failed or the old drive if someone just wiped it by accident.

You probably knew all of that. :)
Click to expand...
I'm considering a spare HDD, make the image copy, put THAT HDD in a safe as a master, then another HDD that gets an image backup every couple of months. There are some other things that can be done.

I'll be looking at the above s/w recommendations next.
 
denverpilot said:
- Backups that aren’t tested aren’t backups. At least once yank the good drive and make darn sure you really can restore from it.
...
- Backups that aren’t tested, aren’t backups. Including restoring to different hardware.
Click to expand...

Did anyone mention - Backups that aren't tested aren't backups :)
 
I have a FREENAS server with a Raid 3 array and periodically do a clone of my laptops and desktop and store it to the server.
 
denverpilot said:
You sure that’s RAID 3 and not a three disk RAID 5?

RAID 3 is extremely rare. And various other configs beat it at the goal it originally had.

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/17274/raid-3
Click to expand...

We did sell some RAID 3 setups to hotels who were using them as video servers back in the mid 90's. It's about the only thing they were better at (and that was in the era of small caches and SCSI drives with AV mode which stopped the head positioning recalibration to avoid interrupting the stream). I had a 32GB RAID array on the floor of my cube because I was writing the benchmark and diagnostic software for it. 8 4GB 1/2 height SCSI drives. Sucker could warm bagels. Good times.
 
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denverpilot said:
You sure that’s RAID 3 and not a three disk RAID 5?

RAID 3 is extremely rare. And various other configs beat it at the goal it originally had.

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/17274/raid-3
Click to expand...
You're right! It is set up as a RAIDZ1 and has a three-disk array of 6TB. Seems to work well and easy recovery as long as you do not lose more than one drive. I have another 3TB drive set up as an FTP server.
 
I recently converted the drive on my HP Pavillion laptop to an SSD card. I used AOMEI Partition Assistant to clone the old drive. It worked fine but took several hours to clone with this old slow computer. The change to SSD really sped up the computer.
 
OK - I'm back on this again.

I need to be able to make an HDD clone of a Win10 computer, all drivers, all registry entries, all boot sectors, everything. Then I need to verify this works by pulling out HDD #1, installing #2, and turning it on. I see Win10 has as a control panel entry, "Backup and Restore (Windows 7)", that has an option for "Create System Image". Is that what I'm looking for?
 
You might consider using a VM to solve for whatever your trying to achieve here.
 
Matthew said:
OK - I'm back on this again.

I need to be able to make an HDD clone of a Win10 computer, all drivers, all registry entries, all boot sectors, everything. Then I need to verify this works by pulling out HDD #1, installing #2, and turning it on. I see Win10 has as a control panel entry, "Backup and Restore (Windows 7)", that has an option for "Create System Image". Is that what I'm looking for?
Click to expand...

No.

Use Macrium.
 
denverpilot said:
No.

Use Macrium.
Click to expand...

Thanks.

I was looking at that a little while ago. It does look like it's a one-time buy (or even free), vs a subscription version like some of the other utilities out there.

edit:

This is for an embedded PC inside a piece of equipment that's going to sit out on a factory floor for many years. Someone will come by on a maintenance schedule and either make a backup or swap drives and run off the image and then repeat on the next scheduled day. The PC, once it's turned on and running, isn't going to get any other updates or have any data that will change and require hourly or daily backups.

Normally, we'd just do a backup to a thumb drive and then replace the HD and then reinstall the OS, and finally recover from the backup. In this case, I need to have a pre-built hard drive with the same image of the drive that's currently running so the whole thing can be swapped out.
 
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Matthew said:
Thanks.

I was looking at that a little while ago. It does look like it's a one-time buy (or even free), vs a subscription version like some of the other utilities out there.
Click to expand...

Sorry was in meetings so couldn’t elaborate earlier. Macrium works great for Windows boxes. The free version will handle it.

Default settings, It’ll grab all partitions including any manufacturer hidden partitions and such too which can be important if they over-engineered and over-integrated their own recovery stuff into Windows but that’s less likely back at Win7 than up on Win10.

The only weirdness is if the machine is so old it’s not using GPT partitions — and that’s fixable but a tad involved to go into here.

Also unlikely but if using any TPM features in the hardware or bitlocker (trusted boot, that type of stuff) those need to be off before cloning or the hardware change will tick off the low level security. Again more of a modern hardware and Win10 thing than likely coming from Win7.

All that will happen for most of the gotchas is the silly thing won’t boot from the newly cloned drive and ya have to go figure out why...

The only other PITA is if the manufacturer stuck hidden partitions AFTER your main NTFS partition. Macrium doesn’t tout itself as a partition resize or move tool so if going to a bigger drive you either have to do partition at a time and set sizes manually, because it can’t move them further down the new drive, or be lazy like me, let it do them all and then use some other tool to move and resize them as you like. Tons of tools that can do that.

If you’re cloning to something like a new SSD, many manufacturers license a tool that’ll just do the clone and resize thing for ya, free download. Samsung has one, for example. They also recommend installing their SSD management tool that sets various settings in the OS, can manage disk / firmware based encryption, etc, depending on hardware capability.
 
Macrium Reflect or Clonezilla.

I use both for critical applications and they both work without fail.
 
We have a RAID 5 set up for visual databases and use Acronis to do bi weekly back ups. Acronis is nothing but problems, seriously NOTHING BUT PROBLEMS. Vault loses connection, backup plans get corrupted, you name it we have it. For OS back ups we use clonezilla and works perfect every time without fail.
 
Great little dongle made by apricorn, USB, does wonders and far less complex.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Current plan is a HDD installed in a caddy, connected via USB to the PC, and Macrium to image the internal HDD onto the remote HDD. Then either archive the copy in a vault or keep some sort of rotation going on a maintenance schedule. The hope is that if there ever is a failure of the internal HDD, the external drive can be swapped and operation can continue. Because this is a piece of industrial equipment, there isn't a need to do a daily backup - it just runs.
 
Macrium.

I gave up on Acronis when they went onto the upgrade hamster-wheel like some other software and released really buggy software every-other-release. The folks that developed Macrium won't sell you the upgrades directly - you MUST go through their dealers, but the product is better and faster than Acronis without some of the garbage and upsells that Acronis has - especially since it appears that Acronis is selling on an annual subscription basis, rather than outright sale.
 
Plus 1 for Marcium, I own a small IT MSP/Consultancy and we use it quite regularly for cloning, it just works.

If it's a critical piece of infra and you want a set and forget backup then I would look at something like https://www.datto.com/products/alto/?ref=homepage. But basically a full cloud/on prem managed backup solution with automated testing of the backup. Lot more complicated and pricier for what you are trying to do and maybe a little overkill but thought I should mention it.
 
Matthew said:
Current plan is a HDD installed in a caddy, connected via USB to the PC, and Macrium to image the internal HDD onto the remote HDD. Then either archive the copy in a vault or keep some sort of rotation going on a maintenance schedule. The hope is that if there ever is a failure of the internal HDD, the external drive can be swapped and operation can continue. Because this is a piece of industrial equipment, there isn't a need to do a daily backup - it just runs.
Click to expand...

Because that RAID is involved, as I recall — and you probably thought of this already — you might want to fully trial actually restoring that backup to a couple of blank drives during some downtime for that machine.

We back up some old Dell stuff that treats multiple physical disks as a single drive as it is presented in hardware to the OS, and the restore process requires manual intervention to get “something as big or bigger” whether one drive or multiple or however — pre-configured and initialized on the RAID controller BIOS before cutting the imaging software loose to copy “the one drive” back.

I think you said it has RAID so I mention it.

Whether it’s hardware or software raid makes a big difference on the restore and what we do is write up a cheat sheet for anybody unfamiliar with the hardware. Literally a step by step “How to restore this old server with hardware RAID controller” type thing.

That way if it isn’t one of us oldsters doing the restore, we still don’t get a phone call. LOL. Or if we do, it’s “here’s full instructions on how you should have done that... right in our don’t Kent management thingy for the team...” heh.

Other fun seen on old stuff like that is things like disk size limits imposed by weird hardware. You go buy a couple drives to slap in the thing at the local store to restore to and find out the manufacturer somehow locked the BIOS to wanting a specific drive size or even brand.

Dell definitely did or does this forever. You can put non-Dell branded disks in their servers just fine but their controllers will whine that they’re degraded or not supported or various crap. Which in their case doesn’t matter in the slightest. The drives work just fine. You can even flash them with Dell’s version of drive firmware.

Anyway ... have fun. Welcome to IT. Two drink minimum, pay the bouncer at the door. LOL
 
I remember dealing with the hard drive locking function with Compaq RAID controllers. The really funny thing was, the Compaq drives were made by Conner (who I worked for) and the drives we were using were identical except the ID string. "It's to ensure proper quality!" the Compaq folks would protest... Nope. It's to preserve corporate profits...
 
jsstevens said:
I remember dealing with the hard drive locking function with Compaq RAID controllers. The really funny thing was, the Compaq drives were made by Conner (who I worked for) and the drives we were using were identical except the ID string. "It's to ensure proper quality!" the Compaq folks would protest... Nope. It's to preserve corporate profits...
Click to expand...

Yeah. That’s Dell’s only reason, too. LOL.

Their stuff is just rebranded Seagate usually.

They’re not as bad today about it as they used to be, but they still do it.

I only brought it up because a lot of “industrial” products seem to play those games.
 
denverpilot said:
Because that RAID is involved, as I recall — and you probably thought of this already — you might want to fully trial actually restoring that backup to a couple of blank drives during some downtime for that machine.

We back up some old Dell stuff that treats multiple physical disks as a single drive as it is presented in hardware to the OS, and the restore process requires manual intervention to get “something as big or bigger” whether one drive or multiple or however — pre-configured and initialized on the RAID controller BIOS before cutting the imaging software loose to copy “the one drive” back.

I think you said it has RAID so I mention it.

Whether it’s hardware or software raid makes a big difference on the restore and what we do is write up a cheat sheet for anybody unfamiliar with the hardware. Literally a step by step “How to restore this old server with hardware RAID controller” type thing.

That way if it isn’t one of us oldsters doing the restore, we still don’t get a phone call. LOL. Or if we do, it’s “here’s full instructions on how you should have done that... right in our don’t Kent management thingy for the team...” heh.

Other fun seen on old stuff like that is things like disk size limits imposed by weird hardware. You go buy a couple drives to slap in the thing at the local store to restore to and find out the manufacturer somehow locked the BIOS to wanting a specific drive size or even brand.

Dell definitely did or does this forever. You can put non-Dell branded disks in their servers just fine but their controllers will whine that they’re degraded or not supported or various crap. Which in their case doesn’t matter in the slightest. The drives work just fine. You can even flash them with Dell’s version of drive firmware.

Anyway ... have fun. Welcome to IT. Two drink minimum, pay the bouncer at the door. LOL
Click to expand...
No RAID. That was one option a while ago. I think we will use an HDD and clone it. I will probably swap it out a few times to verify it works and to write a procedure. Once the equipment goes into production, someone will have to follow up.
 
Matthew said:
No RAID. That was one option a while ago. I think we will use an HDD and clone it. I will probably swap it out a few times to verify it works and to write a procedure. Once the equipment goes into production, someone will have to follow up.
Click to expand...

Ahh. Cool.

I had gotten the impression it was already a production machine and folks all of a sudden were wondering how to back it up. Have done that one before.

Big panic because the manufacturer went out of business...

We were careful and did what you’re doing but only after-hours...
 
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