Mirroring HD's for backup

bluey

bluey

bluey

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7 Sep 2010
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Hi Guys,

Looking at adding a second HD to my machine for backup purposes. Dell C521 2.2GHZ AMD dual core.(both 160GB SATA drives) Ideally I would like the 2nd HD to be a mirror of the first. IE be a complete system disk so that in the event of failure of the 1st HD I could boot off the second with OS & all filesystems etc. Or have the 2nd disk configured to automatically save any files stored to the first disk without OS.

I gather there are a few different options, but would RAID be the answer here ? If so do I need additional hardware such as controllers / software etc. Appreciate some advice on the best way to go.

Cheers
 
if your running a recent version of windows you can just plug the second hard drive in then setup a software raid1 partition with the O/S drive via drive manager

Other options would be firmware raid if you motherboard has it, but that's not as efficient as software raid (in both cases is all done by the cpu but the O/S having control of it is more efficient) and hardware raid which involves an add in card with its own processor/ram and sometimes battery backup (this is the best/most expensive option, and totally over the top for a home user)
 
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Unless you have a real raidcard don't use your motherboards built in RAID options, you will only kick yourself in the face.

Stick with it OS level.
 
Do you want backup or hardware redundancy?

RAID is not backup, it's only for uptime. If you mess up your OS, accidentally delete files, get some sort of corruption, etc then RAID won't help you. If you have another disk for backup (which you should really have anyway) then RAID is fine.

What you could do is clone your OS drive to another once a week and then more frequently use something like robocopy to synch selected files. That way you'll be able to boot from that disk and your files will be there. Or you could use imaging software like Macrium or Acronis to create backup images then you can image these to another disk in the event of failure.
 
Yeah it is really for backup, so everything thats written to the C & D partitions on the prime disk gets automatically written to the same partitions on the backup disk. You know what kids are like with not backing stuff up !, so rather take the risk out of it with them.

Just out of interest. Can you set a regular daily restore point automatically in system restore? as had previous issues with it not restoring to multiple restore points !)
 
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bluey said:
Yeah it is really for backup, so everything thats written to the C & D partitions on the prime disk gets automatically written to the same partitions on the backup disk. You what kids are like with not backing stuff up !, so rather take the risk out of it with them.

I guess I could create a system recovery CD to cover the potential OS issues angle? Is that easy to do ?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure you understand. If you're automatically mirroring a drive through RAID or otherwise then if a file becomes corrupt or gets deleted then that is mirrored as well. So it's not a backup.

I would suggest Acronis True Image to you. You can schedule it for creating images of a drive easily and there's the option of non-stop backup where it will continuously keep track of changes. If your OS screws up can restore it, if it dies you can restore to another disk or another partition on your backup drive, and if you want to restore files you can do so from the images or use non-stop backup. It's a lot more comprehensive than system restore which isn't great at all. W7 has additional system images which are better but it's not as good as third party products.
 
I used to use RAID1 for this but now just make sure the files are the same on both drives.

Given the price of hard drives these days I think it's a great idea. Two 500GB-1TB drives for everything you don't want to lose, depending how much stuff you have...cost what £60-90 and saves burning 100-200+ DVDs (which will also degrade over time...nevermind messing about RARing files bigger than 4.5gb). And very unlikely both drives will die simultaneously.

Mirrored RAID just makes the process more simple...you and the OS just see one drive and it can auto-rebuild. But as said, doesn't stop you deleting something by accident or a file getting corrupted.
 
I use http://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync which incrementally backs up daily, seems to do a good job. You can have all the usual types too - two-way sync, always match source and do/don't delete files from backup disk if they disappear from source etc.

Still run a few BD-RE DLs each month too, in case of epic PSU boom.
 
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