Backups from one HDD to another?

keogh

keogh

keogh

Soldato
Joined
22 Jun 2004
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Location
Bangkok, Thailand (formally London)
Howdy,

Firstly, I am thinking the only way to do what I am about ti ask is RAID, but tbh I don't fully understand the concept of RAID so I may be wrong... and if I am right then please tell me (and a little noob explanation of RAID would be cool :) ).

Anyway, I have a IBM xSeries server I run in another room in the house, and this runs Windows Server 2003 and all my Websites (I'm a web developer!).

Well currently I only have the one HDD in there (its a 150gb Maxtor SATA-II I think), but I have a Samsung Spinpoint 200gb SATA-II hdd knocking arounbd that I want to put into the server instead of the maxtor cos I have heard far too many horror stories about Maxtors.

Well my intention is to put the Samsung in as the master/primary HDD and create the usual partitions (just as I have on the maxtor that is in there) of:

C: Windows ONLY
D: Programs (MySQL/Apache/SQL Server/CFMX/PHP/Oracle etc etc)
E: Websites

Is it possible to put the Maxtor in as a second HDD and whatever I have on my E: drive will get copied to the Maxtor as a backup if you like. So whenever I save a file on the E: drive a copy is made on the Maxtor at the same time?

Is this kinda how RAID works? I'm not bothered about the C: drive being copied... but I wouldn't mind the D: drive being copied too (for the DBs)?

How would I go about doing this? If it is RAID, do both HDDs need to be identical to do this?

I'm just wondering if there is a third party tool out there that will do this, i.e. I tell it what drives I want to "mirror" on the secondary HDD and it does it thing?

Any help will be appreciated!

EDIT: I do know that RAID increases performance slightly (right??), I am not interested in this, the only reason I want this is to get a backup of my files in case the worst happens!

ta

Steve M
 
What you're describing is not true RAID1 in the sense that you're talking about file level mirroring of changes between partitions rather than the exact mirroring of two physical drives.

RAID0 (data striping) will give you a performance increase at the expense of data redundancy, RAID1 (mirroring) will give you redundancy at the expense of capacity and sometimes a slight speed decrease.

Now it's been a while since I did any real work on X Series boxes (they let me play with P Series now :D ) but I'm not sure whether you'll have RAID capability onboard so that option might be out of the window before we get to the non matched drives issue. The easiest option I think is going to be to run a pair on individual drives and then use something like the Synctoy powertoy to keep folders in sync between the two drives although that's a batch process rather than realtime. You could look into mirroring at the Windows level which you get with 2K3 Server but you'd need to do a bit of reading on how to recover a broken mirror because I'm not familiar with it myself.
 
What I recommend for you is RAID1. If there is no onboard as rp intimates, then buy an add on card. RAID1 will simply mirror bits of data - it's that simple. One drive is exactly the same as the other. If one drive corrupts (i.e. from a virus attack, Master file table corrupts), this will be written to both drives, so it is not a backup but most certainly protects against hard drive failure.

It doesn't have to be with identical drives but the array will be the size of the smallest disk.

I would recommend a RAID1 but also a backup solution to an external drive - Acronis True Image Home is out of the window for Server 2003 however, you can still perform a backup of the whole drive using the CD from DOS, even if it won't let you install the program in 2003 - it is what I do!
 
A backup every evening would be fine for me, and I never knew about this Synctoy that rpstewart mentions, and this is actually perfect.

That will copy over ONLY the updated files, so it will be VERY quick if I set this up to run every night. Whereas if I just used the Windows backup tool, that would have to copy EVERYTHING over every night, and thats too much, so this way I can just copy thr changed files over.

Should be good enough!

Thanks for the suggestions though, appreciated!

ta
 
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