Mirror drive

[Let'sgoflying!]

What is a mirror image drive?
If it is what I imagine, it copies your hardrive contents exactly as it stands - and then later if you need, you can erase the HD and reinstall from the mirror image drive to get back exactly where you were. No disks, no downloads. Drie to drive.
????
Might be a good backup system for my current work computers.

 

[Brian Austin]

Yes, it's a block for block identical match to your existing drive.

If it's in a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) configuration, the mirror is automatic but requires a special controller with two identical hard drives. Some backup software offers what you're talking about, though.

 

[Let'sgoflying!]

So I would need a portable external drive... and software to make it all happen?

 

[SCCutler]

Dave, you're Mr. Techno Guy tonight, aren't you?

Take a look at this, the best deal on a very large NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive with RAID 5 as one of the setup options.

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detail.php?productid=97&categoryid=19

Available from all the on-line vendors for a confusingly reasonable price.

 

[Dan Smith]

So I would need a portable external drive... and software to make it all happen?

Right. I use an external USB 2 drive rack...

http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=318173&pfp=BROWSE

and put a hard drive in it that's identical size to my main drive; 120GB in my case, figure $100 or less for the drive.

Then once a week I plug in the external drive and use Norton Ghost...

http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoffice/products/backup_recovery/ghost10/index.html

to copy both the master drive contents (for easy backup access) and the drive image (for seamless restore). The whole process takes about 45 minutes, and Voila - instant peace of mind.

(edited: although built-in systems are convenient, the advantage to this method is that the USB drive can be kept off-site, so that if there is a hardware loss you can just pick up another computer, restore the image, and you're back in business. It works just as well for laptops, which are easily "misplaced").

Dan

 

[jesse]

It comes down to a couple of things:

Redundancy
Safety of data



There are many solutions that are designed to do what you are asking. The simplest one being Norton Ghost. This is a software package that makes a bit by bit copy of your hard dirve. You can have it burn it to CDs or DVD(s). Tihnk of this as making your own recovery cds.

Second off like someone else mentioned is there are some network storage devices that you could plug into your network and backup your information to.

Now.. if this is in a mission critical enviorment, You need to have this be redundant to where there really is no single point of failure (or as few as possible) you also want your information to be safe.

You can go as far as your pocketbook allows.

One network I setup consisted of:

At the DNS level traffic was directed to two seperate servers at two seperate locations with internet connections provided by two seperate companies. (this works great for static sites. Really is a pain in the ass for a dynamic site...like this forum)

At each of these locations there was a server that consisted of:

Dual hotswappable power supplies (power supply dies, no problem..It'll use the other one and you can replace hte current one while its running)

Next these servers were using RAID-5. Basically that means they had multiple hard drives, For speed the data was stripped, For redundancy the data was also mirrored. These drives were hot-swappable. You could have a hard drive fail and it would not effect the server, Simply pull it out and put a new one in (don't even have to shut the server down!)

These servers were running Debian Linux (woody) and I had an uptime of almost two years before I had to reboot them for some secuirty updates (very few...only kernel updates require a reboot in linux. I also had all the data uploaded every 48 hours to another offsite backup location.

---

You can spend as MUCH money as you want on this stuff, and this was a very simple setup.. But quite reliable. You could go as far as to have multiple servers at multiple locations with each location having multiple internet connections from multiple providers with power coming from multiple sources (think LARGE datacenter...like EV1Servers, ServerBeach, RackSpace)

---

Right now all I run is my personal server which is located in a data center. It has two hard drives, I have all the important information sync from the one drive to the other every 24 hours. This data center has multiple internet connections from multiple providers. There is a single point of failure though, and that is if any of the hardware in the server fails. It's down. But I shouldn't loose information. ...This setup is plenty for a personal server.

 

[waldo]

So I would need a portable external drive... and software to make it all happen?

In most cases this is not going to do you very much good if you have a TOTAL hard drive failure. As far as I know, you can not access the external USB hard drive from a bootable disk of any kind since you don't have the USB drivers loaded. If you take that external hard drive and back it up to a bootable DVD . . . THEN you've got something

 

[Brian Austin]

Right. I use an external USB 2 drive rack...

http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=318173&pfp=BROWSE

and put a hard drive in it that's identical size to my main drive; 120GB in my case, figure $100 or less for the drive.

Then once a week I plug in the external drive and use Norton Ghost...

http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoffice/products/backup_recovery/ghost10/index.html

to copy both the master drive contents (for easy backup access) and the drive image (for seamless restore). The whole process takes about 45 minutes, and Voila - instant peace of mind.

(edited: although built-in systems are convenient, the advantage to this method is that the USB drive can be kept off-site, so that if there is a hardware loss you can just pick up another computer, restore the image, and you're back in business. It works just as well for laptops, which are easily "misplaced").

Dan

Nice summary, Dan.

Dave, this is what I would do in your situation. Simple, inexpensive and reliable.

In most cases this is not going to do you very much good if you have a TOTAL hard drive failure. As far as I know, you can not access the external USB hard drive from a bootable disk of any kind since you don't have the USB drivers loaded. If you take that external hard drive and back it up to a bootable DVD . . . THEN you've got something

If it's identical, all you do is swap the hard drives. Take the external USB drive apart and move it to the computer. Back in business in less than 15 minutes.

 

[Len Lanetti]

Yes, it's a block for block identical match to your existing drive.

If it's in a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) configuration, the mirror is automatic but requires a special controller with two identical hard drives.

RAID is available today in machines priced for the home, home/office or small business market.

The main machine in use at our house, a Compaq, has two drives...the disk controller and operating system software that came with the box support linking the drives in a RAID, using them as two independent drives (ie in DOS world C: & D or combining them as one big drive.

Knock on wood, twice the drives got out of sync...system software put them back in sync...no pain, no data loss.

Len

 

[Dan Smith]

RAID is available today in machines priced for the home, home/office or small business market.

The main machine in use at our house, a Compaq, has two drives...the disk controller and operating system software that came with the box support linking the drives in a RAID, using them as two independent drives (ie in DOS world C: & D or combining them as one big drive.

Knock on wood, twice the drives got out of sync...system software put them back in sync...no pain, no data loss.

Len

The reason that I prefer the external drive solution that I described earlier (USB 2.0 hook-up) is that it lets me control when and how the drive image is saved. If I install a new application, I may not want it automatically reflected on my RAID drive until I have used the computer for several days or more, and I'm sure everything is stable and OK. However, the disadvantage of the manual method is that you have to ensure that you actually do it at some point.

Dan

 

[mikea]

The backup drive doesn't have to be identical to the source drive, because the image file from an imaging program is just that, a file, that will be smaller than the original drive, even if the drive is full, because the backup image gets compressed.

Acronis True Image is a better choice than Norton Ghost. The boot CD it makes can be used to backup and restore any computer.
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/
You can buy it for download from New Egg.

Symantec has its #1 priority to make sure you buy often so the boot CD you can make will only work on one per PC, and does a restore, not a backup. Besides, Symantec held talks with Sony to assure them that the Sony DRM rootkit would not be detected by Norton Anti-Virus, which shows you how much you can trust them.

 

[Ghery]

Not a new idea, either. When I worked for Tandem Computers from 1983 to 1995 it was already an old idea on their systems. Of course, their system architecture carried it a bit further. Each drive was connected to two different controllers. Each controller was connected to two separate processors. A single failure anywhere (except incoming power) and not only was the data still on-line and available, you could remove and replace the failed part without shutting down the rest of the system. Run a restore process to bring the new disk drive into sync with the unfailed one without stopping other work. HP now owns the product line (through their aquisition of Compaq, who bought Tandem) and still markets it as their NonStop line. Of course, I remember when we came out with a new disc drive product that had a pair of 12 inch Winchester drives in a cabinet. 168 MBytes each. Oh, the massive storage! Of course, that was in the mid 1980s...