Backup help

[Gamefreak501]

Hi everyone,

A while ago I mentioned about wanting to create an external backup solution for my Photos.

At the moment, I have a 250gb SATA II HDD (well, 232GB) and an 80GB IDE HDD.

I have my windows installation on the 80GB HDD and my 250GB HDD is empty, but will soon have my games and photos put back on it.

What I would like to do is create an automated backup system that will take a copy from my SATA II HDD, put it on my IDE Hard Drive, and then on an external hard drive, on a daily or weekly basis.

However, I have the following qualms:

1) Will I be able to boot off, and install Windows XP SP2 on an SATA II Hard Drive without problems, perhaps using my 80gb HDD as my backup drive? I tried booting off an SATA drive a while back and it didn't work too well.

2) Is it possible to create such an automated system, mentioned above, by using the Backup utility Windows XP comes with?

3). What kind of hard drive should I be looking at for my Windows installation - the same as my 250gb SATA II one? Bearing in mind I have £95 to spare, perhaps a little more, to spend on an external enclosure and another Hard Drive.

I think that's all, cheers!

 

[Berserker]

1) Yes, of course it will. Would be a bit pointless having SATA disks if this didn't work.

2) Use a batch file and xcopy/robocopy/xxxcopy. Backup might do it though.

3) Why not get something like Western Digital WDG1U2500 MyBook Essential 250GB USB2.0 External Hard Drive (HD-083-WD) (£78.14 inc) and use the disk you already have for Windows.

 

[Messiah Khan]

Saving me typing it out again, ive nicked the following directly from my post in another thread. It should do roughly what your after;

The way I have my backup set up, which for me is better than RAID IMO is; A batch file is scheduled to look for a 10 minute idle period every 24 hours after 5pm(Its basically looking for when I have my dinner) The batch file then checks through a list of folders to see if anything has changed, and copies the contents of those folders to another drive. Its basically like RAID1 with a 24 hour delay. Im really pleased with how it works, and it basically means that if something non hardware affects the data, ie a virus, I have 24 hours to sort it out. Where as if you have RAID1, its protected against a drive failure, but it would also copy bad data across in the case of a virus.


Edit; Ive just checked the last backup log file, and it takes 1minute 20 seconds to check through 536gb of data.

@ECHO off
ROBOCOPY "E:\Graphics" "X:\Graphics" *.* /S /PURGE >X:\Backuplog.txt
ROBOCOPY "E:\Uni" "X:\Uni" *.* /S /PURGE >>X:\Backuplog.txt
ROBOCOPY "E:\College" "X:\College" *.* /S /PURGE >>X:\Backuplog.txt
ROBOCOPY "E:\Jobs" "X:\Jobs" *.* /S /PURGE >>X:\Backuplog.txt
ROBOCOPY "E:\Stuff\My website details" "X:\Stuff\My website details" *.* /S /PURGE >>X:\Backuplog.txt
ROBOCOPY "E:\Stuff\Win Settings" "X:\Stuff\Win Settings" *.* /S /PURGE >>X:\Backuplog.txt
ROBOCOPY "E:\Stuff\XP Modding" "X:\Stuff\XP Modding" *.* /S /PURGE >>X:\Backuplog.txt
ROBOCOPY "E:\Stuff\X1" "X:\Stuff\X1" *.* /S /PURGE >>X:\Backuplog.txt
ROBOCOPY "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Favorites" "X:\Favorites" *.* /S /PURGE >>X:\Backuplog.txt
ROBOCOPY "C:\WINDOWS\Fonts" "X:\Fonts" *.* /S /PURGE >>X:\Backuplog.txt
MSG Administrator Backup Complete

Thats the code Ive used. I havent had much experience wih writing batch files, so it aint beautifull, but its effective.

 

[Gamefreak501]

Cheers for the help everyone,

I thought this thread died a grim death!

I'll be picking up the external hard drive fairly shortly, keeping my 80gb hard drive as the windows hard drive and getting something like that USB hard drive you mentioned Beserker.

Thanks Messiah Kahn for the batch file too, I'll be using that I reckon to get my photos sent from my 250gb SATA to a 250gb USB external drive.

Thanks again Beserker and Messiah Kahn