Advice Please: Building A Simple "Back-up" System

External Since: Dec 17, 2003 Posts: 108

I'm going to attempt to put together a system that will use a
mirroring application for backing up.

The system will have three drives of equal size in the main case.(And
if I go SCSI, three more in an external case will be used for less
important data storage). The main three will all start out as
identical, with the operating system and the needed software
installed.

From there, the "E" drive will remain untouched for the most part
except on those rare occasions where a new app will need be installed,
but only after it has been used for a while on my main working "C"
drive.

However, the "C" drive will be mirrored to the "D" drive on a weekly
basis.

So, basically, all my work will be done on the "C" drive, with
occasional back-ups to the "D" drive. And "E" will only be used to to
bring the "C" drive back to it's original state in case anything goes
seriously wrong.

Question #1: Whether on or off the internet, will Windows normally
write to drives "D" and "E", even though I'm doing all my work on "C"?

Question #2: If so, can this be stopped? Will it require having the
ability to power down drives "D" and "E", even when the system is on?
And is this possible if all drives are in the same case?

Question 3: Can I get recommendations on which mirroring app is best
for what I want to do? I've narrowed it down to "Drive Image", and
"True Image", but are there any programs like these that can be run
from a floppy or CD, without having to install anything?

P.S.: I have some RAID hardware, but I realized that complexity makes
RAID a non-option. So since I already have SCSI hardware, I just may
stick with that.

Thanks a lot.

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.

External Since: Nov 21, 2003 Posts: 175

I do something similar but to an external USB2.0 drive that I built myself.
I figure that an external drive would survive a power supply failure in the
main PC. The USB 2.0 drive has about half the bandwidth of my internal drive
(both identical WD1200 drives) but it's still plenty fast enough.

I use "Drive Image" from PowerQuest to do scheduled backups from C: to the
external drive. I can fit several daily and one weekly backups on the
external 120G drive. You can tell DI how many copies to retain. You need to
allow room for one extra as it creates the new image before it deletes the
old one obviously. Each backup takes 13G and about 45 mins to do including a
verify.

My wifes computer is also backed up to the same USB drive over the LAN.

Note that it's not possible to schedule a Norton Ghost backup because Ghost
exits to a DOS like environment to do the backup (at least I never managed
to work out how to do it and I think even the FAQ says its not possible).

Colin

"Darren Harris" <Searcher7.RemoveThis@mail.con2.com> wrote in message
news:9437a27c.0312171339.19c9046b@posting.google.com...
> I'm going to attempt to put together a system that will use a
> mirroring application for backing up.
>
> The system will have three drives of equal size in the main case.(And
> if I go SCSI, three more in an external case will be used for less
> important data storage). The main three will all start out as
> identical, with the operating system and the needed software
> installed.
>
> From there, the "E" drive will remain untouched for the most part
> except on those rare occasions where a new app will need be installed,
> but only after it has been used for a while on my main working "C"
> drive.
>
> However, the "C" drive will be mirrored to the "D" drive on a weekly
> basis.
>
> So, basically, all my work will be done on the "C" drive, with
> occasional back-ups to the "D" drive. And "E" will only be used to to
> bring the "C" drive back to it's original state in case anything goes
> seriously wrong.
>
> Question #1: Whether on or off the internet, will Windows normally
> write to drives "D" and "E", even though I'm doing all my work on "C"?
>
> Question #2: If so, can this be stopped? Will it require having the
> ability to power down drives "D" and "E", even when the system is on?
> And is this possible if all drives are in the same case?
>
> Question 3: Can I get recommendations on which mirroring app is best
> for what I want to do? I've narrowed it down to "Drive Image", and
> "True Image", but are there any programs like these that can be run
> from a floppy or CD, without having to install anything?
>
> P.S.: I have some RAID hardware, but I realized that complexity makes
> RAID a non-option. So since I already have SCSI hardware, I just may
> stick with that.
>
> Thanks a lot.
>
> Darren Harris
> Staten Island, New York.