Best way to "Protect" C Drive

mattyg

mattyg

mattyg

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After having a bit of a scare with my 990 Pro M.2 I was thinking about how to protect the PC. I ordered another 4tb 990 and Macrium has cloned it so i have an exact copy.

Is there a way to make a mirror raid now or is it a case of starting again. I'd rather avoid having to set everything up again if possible

Or do I just keep getting Macrium to clone the OS drive to the spare M.2 and replace it if fallsover


Ta
 
I guess you could run RAID-1 on your machine but I'm sure someone else will have a more practical solution.

Also, I know this isn't answering your question, but something that helps me sleep at night is treating my PC and laptop as essentially disposable. A NAS at home stores all the big stuff, partially on a RAID-1 for the important stuff (family photos etc). That's also backed up to AWS Glacier and occasionally gets copied to an external HDD that lives at someone else's house.
The smaller stuff that's not hyper-critical (old invoices etc) is all on Google Drive, replicated onto the drive of any machine that uses it in case Google disappears tomorrow.

Between all of that I can have my PC and laptop disappear with zero notice and there's no permanent damage.
 
Your backup strategy depends on your needs/requirements. For example i backup my OS drive when i remember so that can be a year or two out of date at times, however i have a scheduled task that runs every Sunday to create a backup of 'My Documents' folder, web browser and email profiles, and whatever I've saved to the desktop (as that's where things I'm actively working on go) and they all get backed up to a second physical drive in the machine.

That way if my OS drive goes mammaries up i can replace it and only have to spend a couple of hours getting the OS and installed software up to date and restore what's important data to me from a week ago. If my secondary drive goes the same way i just need to replace it an remake the backups.

Like i said what's best for your situation really depends on how you use your PC, how important certain data is, and how easy it would be to replace that data. Reinstalling or re-imaging an OS and spending half a day updating maybe a bit of a PITA but it's nothing compared to loosing 10-20 years of family photos, accounts, email addresses and those sorts of things.
 
You can schedule macrium to clone it
At whatever time interval you want

To raid it you would wipe everything on both drives

You can mirror drives in
Windows storage spaces
But again would wipe everything while creating it

Storage spaces does have the advantage of
Being part of windows
So unlike motherboard hardware raid
Storage spaces allows changing hardware including
Motherboards
And will still function fine
I use this as one of my backup strategies
Then I have a file comparison software run at boot up
And it copies any new stuff on C to D
And vice versa any new stuff on D to C
This is faster than keep cloning drives all the time

Though I do have 9 drives not counting externals lol
So I have multiple backup strategies
 
sastusbulbas said:
What actually happened with the original 990 Pro to make you think you need a clone?
Click to expand...
I came to a disk recovery didn't work screen. After trying to repair. Rollback etc. I rebooted into BIOS and the OS drive wasn't selected a Storage drive was. No wonder the OS couldnt start. So selected the OS drive as first boot order and rebooted. Then I got a lock up and the OS drive vanished again.. However its been on for 24 hrs now after updating the firmware. So I'm hoping a windows update made it crap out and that its fixed now.

I just dont want to face reinstalling everything. Just the email accounts takes a day 15+ accounts and if I've forgotten the passwords I'll have to change on 5 other devices....Eeek!!
 
Should always have some sort of backup
Before things go wrong
As you say reinstalling windows is pretty fast
Nowadays
It's all the other stuff that can take hours

You should use a free email backup software too
By the sound of it
I used to use thunderbird to collect emails from
Different accounts
Then used mozbackup to make backups of all the emails
Think theres other free softwares to do similar
Since cloning doesn't copy online emails
 
Capitano said:
How much data are we talking? Can you do any cloud backups for your storage?
Click to expand...
Oh I'm not concerned about storage. I've 40tbin a Synology NAS for dropbox and other business stuff. Plus 80Tb in a UNAS Pro. and another couple 100TB in a chia mining rig I've just turned off. Its the hassle of a dead OS drive i'm trying to litigate
 
If you have that much storage
You can also schedule macrium to
Make image backups on schedule to
Your storage
Something like 1 base image then
Incremental images
Or full images with the oldest getting deleted
By macrium when it reaches conditions
You set in macrium
Macrium also has image guardian which protect your stored images being tampered with
 
It depends what you are trying to achieve, how much data you have and how important it is to you.

If a PC goes bang and you are unlucky enough that it takes out the C: drive there’s a good chance it will take out a secondary drive as well...

If a PC gets infected with malware it will probably mess up a secondary as well...

If you mirror an encrypted drive and something messes up the bios there’s a chance you will then have two drives you can't access...



That said I've used raid 1 for the OS drive in servers as it protected against a single drive failure, but the important data would be on raid 5/6/10 and there would still be backup solution in place.



The OS can be reinstalled, games and software can be downloaded again, a lot of game saves are in the cloud, browser favourites can be stored in the cloud.


That leaves local files that aren't backed up to the cloud, if they are important to you then think about an offline solution such as an external drive that is not physically attached to your PC or mains power all the time.

Then think of an off-site solution either another external drive or trusted cloud storage so if the worst happens and your house gets struck by lightning and burns down you still have a way to restore them.



Edit:
You just updated as I was posting in which case I would be looking for a way to make an "image" of the OS drive that is not stored on the PC but if you use encryption you could still run into problems.
 
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