Hard Drive Miroring/Backup & Data Recovery Service

Tom Scales wrote:
William P.N. Smith wrote in message
...

"Tom Scales" wrote:

the middle of the night, so slow is OK. Since I have a 4 megabit cable
connection and my brother does too

What's your uplink speed?



Good point. Just tested and it is 366kbps. Adequate for the volume I'll be
backing up.


Something to bare in mind is that if you plan to use the internet during
the transfer (like to download your brother's drive), you ought to look
into a program that can throttle your upload bandwith otherwise you will
saturate your connection and won't be able to receive anything online
during the transfer. This frequently occurs when peoplle don't setup
bittorrent properly (you need some bandwith to send ACK', etc.). Also
note that although you're getting 366kbps currently, it will most likely
be a bit slower in practice. This is due to overhead from the
encryption and the fact that cable modems are shared, not dedicated,
lines.

I haven't looked into this syncback program, but it's probably safe to
assume after the initial transfer it simply does incremental backups.
If that is the case, it may be simpler to just snail mail your brother a
mirror of your current drive instead of transfering everything over the
internet initially. Remember, your upload (and download) bandwith is
measured in bits/sec not bytes/sec.

Adios,
~Nick

"Nicholas Andrade" wrote in message
. com...
Tom Scales wrote:
William P.N. Smith wrote in message
...

"Tom Scales" wrote:

the middle of the night, so slow is OK. Since I have a 4 megabit cable
connection and my brother does too

What's your uplink speed?



Good point. Just tested and it is 366kbps. Adequate for the volume I'll
be backing up.
Something to bare in mind is that if you plan to use the internet during
the transfer (like to download your brother's drive), you ought to look
into a program that can throttle your upload bandwith otherwise you will
saturate your connection and won't be able to receive anything online
during the transfer. This frequently occurs when peoplle don't setup
bittorrent properly (you need some bandwith to send ACK', etc.). Also
note that although you're getting 366kbps currently, it will most likely
be a bit slower in practice. This is due to overhead from the encryption
and the fact that cable modems are shared, not dedicated, lines.

I haven't looked into this syncback program, but it's probably safe to
assume after the initial transfer it simply does incremental backups. If
that is the case, it may be simpler to just snail mail your brother a
mirror of your current drive instead of transfering everything over the
internet initially. Remember, your upload (and download) bandwith is
measured in bits/sec not bytes/sec.

Adios,
~Nick

Nick,

I don't care about using it during the sync. It will sync in the middle of
the night. My download speed is close to 6mpbs and upload is 366kbps, so
incrementals should be fine. Mine is the larger backup, so I'm going to
send him an external hard drive with the initial backup intact (over 100GB).

Tom

tom, that is a clever way to start the process. the initial backup would
otherwise take a miserably long time.

"Tom Scales" wrote in message
m...




"Nicholas Andrade" wrote in message
. com...
Tom Scales wrote:
William P.N. Smith wrote in message
...

"Tom Scales" wrote:

the middle of the night, so slow is OK. Since I have a 4 megabit cable
connection and my brother does too

What's your uplink speed?



Good point. Just tested and it is 366kbps. Adequate for the volume I'll
be backing up.
Something to bare in mind is that if you plan to use the internet during
the transfer (like to download your brother's drive), you ought to look
into a program that can throttle your upload bandwith otherwise you will
saturate your connection and won't be able to receive anything online
during the transfer. This frequently occurs when peoplle don't setup
bittorrent properly (you need some bandwith to send ACK', etc.). Also
note that although you're getting 366kbps currently, it will most likely
be a bit slower in practice. This is due to overhead from the encryption
and the fact that cable modems are shared, not dedicated, lines.

I haven't looked into this syncback program, but it's probably safe to
assume after the initial transfer it simply does incremental backups. If
that is the case, it may be simpler to just snail mail your brother a
mirror of your current drive instead of transfering everything over the
internet initially. Remember, your upload (and download) bandwith is
measured in bits/sec not bytes/sec.

Adios,
~Nick

Nick,

I don't care about using it during the sync. It will sync in the middle of
the night. My download speed is close to 6mpbs and upload is 366kbps, so
incrementals should be fine. Mine is the larger backup, so I'm going to
send him an external hard drive with the initial backup intact (over
100GB).

Tom

Tom Scales wrote:


Nick,

I don't care about using it during the sync. It will sync in the middle of
the night. My download speed is close to 6mpbs and upload is 366kbps, so
incrementals should be fine. Mine is the larger backup, so I'm going to
send him an external hard drive with the initial backup intact (over 100GB).

Tom



You stated earlier that you will both be uploading to each other; I was
pointing out that if you plan to send data to each other simultaneously
you will run into problems from upload saturation. If you ae uploading
data packets at your maximum rate, you will be unable to send ACK
packets to your brother (to ACKnowledge your receiving his data
packets). This situation may occur in reverse as well (if he's
uploading data at max rate, you will be running into problems sending
him data). This is a common networking problem, and well worth checking
if the product you're interested in can control bandwith settings.

"Nicholas Andrade" wrote in message
om...
Tom Scales wrote:


Nick,

I don't care about using it during the sync. It will sync in the middle
of the night. My download speed is close to 6mpbs and upload is 366kbps,
so incrementals should be fine. Mine is the larger backup, so I'm going
to send him an external hard drive with the initial backup intact (over
100GB).

Tom

You stated earlier that you will both be uploading to each other; I was
pointing out that if you plan to send data to each other simultaneously
you will run into problems from upload saturation. If you ae uploading
data packets at your maximum rate, you will be unable to send ACK packets
to your brother (to ACKnowledge your receiving his data packets). This
situation may occur in reverse as well (if he's uploading data at max
rate, you will be running into problems sending him data). This is a
common networking problem, and well worth checking if the product you're
interested in can control bandwith settings.

Interesting. In 22 years in the computer business, I've never had a problem
with two connections being unable to handle the load of simultaneous
transfers. For example, I saturate my gigabit backbone in both directions
doing exactly this every night.

Regardless, I do know to time the backups to not run conncurrently.

Tom

Tom Scales wrote:

"Nicholas Andrade" wrote in message
om...

Tom Scales wrote:


Nick,

I don't care about using it during the sync. It will sync in the middle
of the night. My download speed is close to 6mpbs and upload is 366kbps,
so incrementals should be fine. Mine is the larger backup, so I'm going
to send him an external hard drive with the initial backup intact (over
100GB).

Tom

You stated earlier that you will both be uploading to each other; I was
pointing out that if you plan to send data to each other simultaneously
you will run into problems from upload saturation. If you ae uploading
data packets at your maximum rate, you will be unable to send ACK packets
to your brother (to ACKnowledge your receiving his data packets). This
situation may occur in reverse as well (if he's uploading data at max
rate, you will be running into problems sending him data). This is a
common networking problem, and well worth checking if the product you're
interested in can control bandwith settings.


Interesting. In 22 years in the computer business, I've never had a problem
with two connections being unable to handle the load of simultaneous
transfers. For example, I saturate my gigabit backbone in both directions
doing exactly this every night.

Regardless, I do know to time the backups to not run conncurrently.

Tom


Well it largely depends on the protocols used, but you can verify the
problem yourself by downloading bittorrent and connecting with your max
upload speed set to say 48KBpps (you can set the upload rate by calling
btdownloadgui.exe from DOS with the following parameter
--max_upload_speed 48 -- note the speeds in kilobytes not bits). Try it
on a huge linux distro with 1000's of seeders (where you ought to get a
few hundred Kbps down), you'll observe the problem I'm mentioning as
soon as you surpass 46KBps up.

"Tom Scales" wrote:
Interesting. In 22 years in the computer business, I've never had a problem
with two connections being unable to handle the load of simultaneous
transfers. For example, I saturate my gigabit backbone in both directions
doing exactly this every night.

You probably aren't saturating your gigabit backbone, but you can very
easily saturate a (say) 384K uplink and cause download dropouts. When
my wife used to use BitTorrent she would kill our entire internet
connectivity.

[Remember, (most) DSL and cable broadband connections are asymetrical,
and that can cause some rather strange problems. Clogging the uplink
can (by denying ACKs to the downlink transfers) slow the downlink
significantly. Doing online backups you have to look at the uplink
speed, not the downlink...]

William P.N. Smith wrote in message
...
"Tom Scales" wrote:
Interesting. In 22 years in the computer business, I've never had a
problem
with two connections being unable to handle the load of simultaneous
transfers. For example, I saturate my gigabit backbone in both directions
doing exactly this every night.

You probably aren't saturating your gigabit backbone, but you can very
easily saturate a (say) 384K uplink and cause download dropouts. When
my wife used to use BitTorrent she would kill our entire internet
connectivity.

[Remember, (most) DSL and cable broadband connections are asymetrical,
and that can cause some rather strange problems. Clogging the uplink
can (by denying ACKs to the downlink transfers) slow the downlink
significantly. Doing online backups you have to look at the uplink
speed, not the downlink...]


Understood. I still think I'll be OK.

Tom

Acronis True Image 8.0 maybe?

wrote in message
. ..
My buddy lost his 80 gb HF two weeks ago,, with bunches of family
pictures, his complete
movie base,, and all his music,, ect,,ect He backed up some of his music
& pictures to
CD but his library had grown to be larger than one 700 MB cd,, so backups
had slipped.

As his system was an older 2GHz, he decided to get a new 8400, 3.4 GHz,
w/160 GB drive...

He would like to be able to schedule a mirror copy routine at 12 am, on to
a redundant 160
mb drive. He uses XP as built, lets MS put things where it wants,, doesn't
really know or
care to know where XP puts things. He just wants a complete backup,, and
if it was
IPL'able by switching cables,, that would be great...

I an working to help him buy another 160 GB drive, but I'm at a loss for
the software..

1)Any suggestions and/or antidotal stories about which packages
work-don't, easy-hard,,
cheap-expensive???

2)The drive that went south,, he's wants to send it to a data recovery
service to see if
the data can be salvaged.. Anyone have any suggestions about a commercial
recover
service??

My system is the same age and the last time I looked, the anti-virus scan
found 500K
files, with 8.4 GB of digital film,, I also need to do some pre-failure
planning..

Thanks
Jim
An Old Parrot Head
In The Conch Republic
Just South of Reality