What do you use for backup today?

John Doe writes:

Microsoft has the power to force the issue, but Microsoft would
rather bind the user to a single installation on one machine.
Fortunately we can still produce files in Windows that can be
removed.

I have no idea what you are talking about.

Anyway, individual Windows applications can store their configuration
information in any way they choose. The OS does provide a registry
along with API calls to access it in a consistent way, and
applications can store their configuration information in the registry
if they so choose. The decision to provide a registry was an
attempted technical solution to the problem of incoherencies across
applications in the ways they stored configuration information, making
back up and restore of applications difficult in some cases (because
they stored their information in weird places, or because they even
modified configuration data belonging to other programs).

It was a good idea, but it's not without problems of its own. The
biggest problem is that the registry is a "magic" file that cannot
easily be saved and restored as a block. It is always allocated to
the system and thus perpetually "busy." It contains mixed data from
many different applications and so restoration en masse of the file is
likely to cause problems. Overall, it ends up being no better or
worse than the way things were before (and the way they still are on
UNIX); it's just different. Unfortunately, even Microsoft is not very
consistent in its use of the registry (try to find all the parameters
for Internet Explorer in the registry, and you'll see).

Back to the subject of application data/settings. Some people keep
their programs on a second partition. I have done that before, but
nowadays the operating system installation is massive by itself,
so I do the basic installation/settings plus the most needed
applications, and copy the whole thing.

I install applications in a folder I call \Software (I don't like the
default \Program Files folder), but other than that I don't do much.
Software I can usually reinstall from scratch, so the main issue is
just saving configuration data, and unfortunately that often involves
the registry, with all the problems described above.

On Fri, 15 Jul 2005 12:32:19 +0200, Mxsmanic
wrote:

Over the past few years the capacity of disk drives (and the amount of
space typically used on them) has greatly increased, and now it is
getting more and more difficult to figure out how to back up these
drives.

What type of hardware (and software) do you use on your systems for
backup?

Raided drives using PCI card not motherboard dependant (plus
identical spare raid card), a 3rd copy on non-raided drives
(offline system only plugged into lan or power for this
purpose), a 4th copy on DVD (formerly CDR). 3rd copy
updated less often, 4th even less. Then there's basic
records and such, smaller file sets also on flash media.
Basically the plan revolves around getting the more frequent
backups done quicker as I find that makes it more likely to
get done regularly. Tape made more sense in the past, IMO,
but after HDD prices plummeted per capacity they can be
cheap to throw into old boxes- plus "old" boxes are quite a
bit more suitable since it's been a few years since the
typical board started supporting 48bit LBA, large HDDs.

Please see my inline comments...

Anna writes:
In my opinion, the best backup system for the average home user and even
small business owner in most cases is having his or her desktop computer
equipped with two removable hard drives and using a disk imaging program
such as Symantec's Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image to "clone" the
contents of their working hard drive to another removable hard drive.

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
This solution is tempting to me, too, although I don't have the budget
for it at the moment. It might be the way I go in future, as tape
drives with sufficient capacity to hold all the disk space I now have
would cost thousands of dollars for the drives alone, plus $100 or so
each for each data cartridge.

Anna responds:
As I've later indicated, the cost of equipping one's desktop computer with
two removable drives, including the two mobile racks, the additional hard
drive, and the disk imaging software, while not trifling, is *not* an
expensive proposition for most users. I would estimate the cost would be in
the neighborhood of $100 to $150.

And you're doing all this in one fell swoop, the result of which is the
creation of an exact duplicate of your working hard drive. And for
*added*
safety you can remove this newly-cloned hard drive from the premises, not
to
mention making unlimited additional clones you desire for near-absolute
security.

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
Yes, being able to move the media elsewhere is important, as it guards
against major disasters.

Anna comments...
While it is true that backup software programs can backup the files you
have
created in your various programs, they are unable to backup your
operating
system and (for the most part) the programs installed on your computer.
As
others have pointed out more that once, many, if not most, computer users
have invested substantial time and effort in customizing Windows and
configuring their applications to work the way they want to and putting
all
of that back the way it was can be a difficult, frustrating, and
time-consuming effort.

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
But there is an opposite side to the coin: What happens if you have to
restore the system to somewhat different hardware? All that OS
information in the registry covering the hardware configuration now is
obsolete. You'll be restoring a system that may not even boot. How
do you selective restore from a clone in such a way that you get all
your data and software configuration information back, but you can
still restore to a somewhat different hardware configuration?

Anna responds...
I really can't see why "there is an opposite side to the coin". The whole
idea of what we are discussing is a mechanism that backs up one's current
system, and does it simply, conveniently, effectively, with reasonable
speed, and is reasonably cost-effective. To indicate that this recommended
mechanism is somewhat deficient because it will not be as simple,
convenient, effective, etc. to restore *another* system introduces a
completely different objective, does it not? Anyway, should the user
completely revamp his/her hardware, programs, etc. etc., wouldn't the user
simply make a clone of his/her new system along the lines I've described?
Why would a user even attempt to use his/her "old" clone to restore to a
different system?

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
After all, if your computer is destroyed, you may not be able to build
one that is rigorously identical to it from a hardware standpoint.
And if the new computer isn't identical, restoring the software
configuration for the hardware may cause a heap of trouble. You have
to be able to modify the hardware configuration information without
changing anything else. How do you do that with something that just
clones the entire drive?

Anna responds...
Please refer to my remarks above. A clone is a clone is a clone. Obviously
it's designed to be a clone of the system one has cloned from. If the user
subsequently builds a completely new system then he or she will clone the
contents of that new system to another clone would he not? And anyway, the
cloned drive *could* be used (with some modification) to clone the contents
of the old drive back to the new system for restoration purposes. See my
further comments on this below.

... isn't it nice to know that you
have at hand a perfectly good virus-free clone of your hard drive?

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
Yes, if I have an identical hardware platform to which I can restore
the clone.

Anna responds:
Honestly, isn't that what we're *really* talking about? For the overwhelming
number of users the basic issue is backing up one's current system.

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
How do you restore the clone to the virus-infected drive without
infecting both with the virus? After all, you'll be running the
cloning program on the machine that has the virus.

Anna responds:
It nearly goes without saying that when a user clones his/her drive, he/she
must ensure that the drive is malware-free and suffers no system files
corruption. If you clone garbage, garbage is what you'll get. Presumably the
cloned drive is virus-free, so that if the working drive subsquently becomes
virus infected, restoring it from that "good" clone represents one of the
basic advantages of the disk cloning process.

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
Your only choice would be to buy yet a third disk, and clone the clean
disk to that. You _might_ be able to clone back to the infected disk
eventually, too, if you can be sure that no virus will sneak in.

Anna responds:
You're really losing me here. Hopefully, my remarks directly above have
clarified the issue for you.

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
But really, viruses aren't a big problem in my view. Drive failures
and other hardware failures are. A simple drive failure can be fixed
by a cloning program such as you describe. But if you have to replace
other hardware, or build a new machine ... then what?

Anna responds:
I'm glad to hear that virus infection is not particularly troubling for you.
But believe me, it is for many, many computer users. And it's here that the
virus-free cloned drive is especially valuable.
So let's say that the user builds a new machine with different hardware, say
a new motherboard, a new processor, new RAM, new HD, etc. -- in short, a new
system. The cloned drive could *still* be used to clone the contents of
the old drive back to the new system. Sure, after doing so, the user would
presumably need to install (or reinstall) whatever drivers are necessary for
the new system. But his/her precious programs/data would be intact. And
there's no reason why that newly-cloned drive would not be bootable. There
may be activation issues, of course, assuming we're dealing with Windows XP,
but that's another issue.

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
Not that traditional tape backups are any better in this respect,
though. It's a problem for any kind of backup.

Anna says...
Everything is done outside of your computer because
each hard drive resides in a tray (caddy) that you simply slide into the
computer's mobile rack.

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
Sounds nice, but what about performance ... and purchase cost? It's
the former lower and the latter higher for removal drives? Disk
drives are the slowest link in the chain as it is already.

Anna responds:
As to "performance" - I take it you're referring to speed of cloning, yes?
Using medium to high-powered processors and modern hard drives, cloning
speed will be somewhere around 1.5 GB/min. Not breakneck speed by any
stretch, but I would guess sufficient for most users. And the nice thing
about the cloning process is that the user need not be in attendance during
most of the process. Once he/she initiates the process, it automatically
performs the cloning process.
As to cost, as I mentioned above - about $100 to $150 for the two mobile
racks, the additional HD, and the cloning software.

Anna says:
There's *no* need to partition and format the new drive; *no* need to
reinstall your operating system on the new drive; *no* need to reinstall
your programs and data files. None of this is necessary. By simply
cloning
the previously-cloned hard drive to the new drive you once again have two
functioning hard drives at your disposal. And a simple turn of the mobile
rack's keylock allows the user to boot to either hard drive following the
cloning operation.

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
Unless your hardware configuration has changed. If your cloned system
expects video card A and you've had to replace your burnt-out card A
with a new video card B, it may be difficult to even boot, although I
suppose in that particular case you could fix things fairly quickly.

Anna responds:
There shouldn't be a booting problem at all. As I stated above, after the
contents of the cloned drive has been cloned to the new system, it will
probably will be necessary to install a new video card driver in the example
you've given, but there should be no boot problem at all.

Anna says:
As previously indicated, these mobile rack devices are two-piece
affairs -
the rack itself and the inner tray or caddy (in which the hard drive
resides) that slides into the rack. They come in all-aluminum models or a
combination of aluminum-plastic ranging in price from about $15 to $50.
Naturally, your desktop computer case will need two 5¼" bays that are
available to house the mobile racks. Mobile racks come in various
versions,
depending upon whether the hard drive to be housed is an IDE/ATA, SATA,
or
SCSI device. A Google search for "removable hard drive mobile racks" will
result in a wealth of information on these products and their vendors.
I'm
aware of many users who have been using inexpensive plastic mobile racks
without any problems whatsoever. Unfortunately, there is no industry
standard involving the design and construction of the racks nor the inner
trays that contain the hard drive.Consequently, there is (usually) no
interchangeability of these trays among the various manufacturers of
mobile
racks. Indeed, there is frequently no interchangeability of the inner
trays
among different models from the same manufacturer. This lack of
interchangeability may not be an issue if the user will be purchasing a
particular model of mobile rack for a single computer, however, if the
user
will have access to other computers, he or she may want to settle on a
specific brand and model of mobile rack that will provide for tray
interchangeability amongst different computers.

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
I'm not clear on this: are you saying that the drives themselves are
ordinary internal disk drives and it's just a special rack that allows
them to be connected more easily, or what? Don't you have to buy
special removable drives and racks that match?

Anna responds:
That's correct. The hard drives are ordinary PATA or SATA drives, nothing
special about them. You just plop them in the tray (caddy), make two simple
connections (power & data cable), and slide the tray into the mobile rack
(which has been installed in the case's 5 1/4" bay, just like a CD-ROM).
Takes about 30 seconds. Obviously you would want the same make/model for the
two mobile racks so that the inner trays would be interchangeable.

Anna says:
I can virtually guarantee that once you begin working with two removable
hard drives, you'll have but one regret and only one regret. And that is
you
didn't have this arrangement on your previous computer or computers.
While
the additional cost involved in configuring your desktop computer with
two
mobile racks together with the additional hard drive and disk imaging
software is not negligible, I can assure you it's money well spent.

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
I tend to agree. Unfortunately I have no money to spend at the
moment. When I do, though, I'll surely look into it, as the
alternative of buying a DLT or DDS4 tape drive would probably be at
least as expensive if not more.

Anna responds:
I truly hope you seriously consider this hardware configuration. We gave up
on using tape for backup purposes years ago because of the many difficulties
we encountered with that system. We have installed or helped install
hundreds of systems along the lines I have recommended and I can't recall a
single user ever expressing dissatisfaction with this configuration.

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
Right now I try to keep irreplaceable stuff in a few key folders and I
just copy those somewhere periodically. Not very convenient and very
error prone, but that's all the budget allows right now. Periodically
I save to tape, although now I require multiple DDS cassettes for each
backup because of the growing size of the disks.

Anna says:
Frankly,
when you consider the enormous advantages of having two removable hard
drives on your desktop computer, the additional cost of so equipping your
computer in this fashion practically pales into insignificance.

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
If you have the money in the first place, but I don't. Maybe someday.
Thanks for your ideas, anyway--it does sound like going removable may
be the wave of the future.

Anna responds:
Obviously that's a decision you have to make based on your particular
circumstances. As I've indicated above, we're not talking "big bucks" here.
While I recognize it's not a trifling cost for many users, it's certainly
not an enormous amount by any stretch.
And I would respectfully correct your final statement...
Equipping one's desktop computer with two removable hard drives is not the
"wave of the future", rather, it's here & now.
Anna

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...
Over the past few years the capacity of disk drives (and the amount of
space typically used on them) has greatly increased, and now it is
getting more and more difficult to figure out how to back up these
drives.

What type of hardware (and software) do you use on your systems for
backup?

Up to now, I've used HP DDS tape drives (DAT drives) for backup. But
DDS2 is limited to 4 GB, and DDS3 is limited to 24 GB, and that's
getting to be to small to hold even one backup on a single tape (or
even on several tapes in some cases).

So, what else is there? These DAT drives already cost me a fortune in
the good old days, and today they cost nearly as much as the rest of
the computer, when I can find them ... and even DDS4 is still limited
to 40 GB. DLT drives are several times more expensive at the cheap
end, although they do have capacity to hold an entire drive of data.

Are there other practical alternatives? What about external USB
drives, can that work? Old stuff like Zip drives and so on is
history, as it has even less capacity than tape. Archiving to CD or
DVD is also too low in capacity. It's getting to the point that the
only affordable option seems to be some sort of disk-to-disk copy (or
RAID for those who can afford it), but it would be nice to have
removable media that could be put in a safe place.

So what is everyone else building into their new machines for backup?
And do you just use standard backup tools like ntbackup on Windows or
dump on UNIX, or do you use special software purchased separately?

let the boys bitch on while I add my 10p worth............

Hardwa An internal 80gb HDD and an external 250gb USB HDD. Both Maxtor's.
I back up both my comps to the external drive. Rather a belt and braces
idea.

Softwa Acronis True Image 8. Nice easy to use software. (also offers good
recovery prog which I used to recover my daughters lappy when Windoz went
walkies)

ted

Mxsmanic wrote:
spodosaurus writes:


Even windows sofware RAID is quite cheap. Unlike hardware RAID, you need
to use the manufacturer's windows drivers.


The motherboards of the last two PCs I've been support hardware RAID
for SATA drives, but I'm wary of trying it out, as things like that
move into the "danger area" of hardware/software interactions that can
cause lots of problems and take forever to sort out.

Actually, yhey probably did not (the VAST vast VAST majority do not)
support hardware RAID, but windows simply recognised the chips and
installed the drivers automagically. The drivers then interact with
whatever the chip's setting sare (RAID 0,1,5) and away you go. I made
this mistake with linux and an old promise RAID controller built into my
motherboard. Because it seemed to work seemlessly, I thought it was
hardware RAID. In fact, it is not. The cheapest hardware RAID you're
likely to find is a 3Ware card. They're quite good, too.

Ari

--
spammage trappage: replace fishies_ with yahoo

I'm going to die rather sooner than I'd like. I tried to protect my
neighbours from crime, and became the victim of it. Complications in
hospital following this resulted in a serious illness. I now need a bone
marrow transplant. Many people around the world are waiting for a marrow
transplant, too. Please volunteer to be a marrow donor:
http://www.abmdr.org.au/
http://www.marrow.org/

On Sat, 16 Jul 2005 15:47:34 +0800, spodosaurus
wrote:

Mxsmanic wrote:
spodosaurus writes:


Even windows sofware RAID is quite cheap. Unlike hardware RAID, you need
to use the manufacturer's windows drivers.


The motherboards of the last two PCs I've been support hardware RAID
for SATA drives, but I'm wary of trying it out, as things like that
move into the "danger area" of hardware/software interactions that can
cause lots of problems and take forever to sort out.

Actually, yhey probably did not (the VAST vast VAST majority do not)
support hardware RAID, but windows simply recognised the chips and
installed the drivers automagically. The drivers then interact with
whatever the chip's setting sare (RAID 0,1,5)

The chip has not "settings", either the user sets it up in
the RAID bios right after the regular motherboard POST
screen or that RAID bios just defaults to single spans.

and away you go. I made
this mistake with linux and an old promise RAID controller built into my
motherboard. Because it seemed to work seemlessly, I thought it was
hardware RAID. In fact, it is not. The cheapest hardware RAID you're
likely to find is a 3Ware card. They're quite good, too.


There is no "mistake" about it, there is no benefit to a
3ware card from this persective, in that the exact same
promise chipset is available in a PCI card too. True it IS
a software raid card, but in practice the difference is in
performance/offloading, not necessarily anything more unless
there was need to use the card in an OS that wasn't
supported by the available drivers.

The more problematic part with the integrated SATA on modern
boards is that being integral to a southbridge, there are no
PCI card replacements, if the motherboard were to fail the
odds are high it would require same motherboard chipset and
perhaps even a motherboard with same raid bios level, though
not necessarily the exact same make and model of board. For
these reasons, it's more of a PITA to use any integrated
RAID for RAID0. RAID1 may be movable to other chipsets but
single striped may not. Fortunately the default is single
span instead of single stripe.

spodosaurus writes:

Actually, yhey probably did not (the VAST vast VAST majority do not)
support hardware RAID, but windows simply recognised the chips and
installed the drivers automagically.

Well, no, that's not what the manual says. The manual says that
hardware provides RAID levels 0, 1, and 0+1, plus an Intel Matrix mode
that I know nothing about. It says nothing about any requirement for
supporting software, except that special drivers are required if you
are running Windows 2000 or XP. People are using these boards for
other operating systems with RAID, so it's not a Windows feature, it's
a board feature.

However, for reasons already stated, I've not attempted to configure
RAID, anyway, so I don't know for sure.

The drivers then interact with
whatever the chip's setting sare (RAID 0,1,5) and away you go. I made
this mistake with linux and an old promise RAID controller built into my
motherboard. Because it seemed to work seemlessly, I thought it was
hardware RAID. In fact, it is not.

Then what was the controller doing?

The cheapest hardware RAID you're
likely to find is a 3Ware card. They're quite good, too.

I've debated trying RAID in the past. However, it brings up so many
hardware and software issues that I've shied away from it. I prefer
to keep things as simple as possible. And while RAID protects against
drive failure, it doesn't protect against anything else (accidental
deletion, destruction of the machine, etc.). I see it more as a
solution for systems that must be online continuously, 24 hours a day,
rather than as a substitute for normal backup.

Anna writes:

Anna responds...
I really can't see why "there is an opposite side to the coin". The whole
idea of what we are discussing is a mechanism that backs up one's current
system, and does it simply, conveniently, effectively, with reasonable
speed, and is reasonably cost-effective. To indicate that this recommended
mechanism is somewhat deficient because it will not be as simple,
convenient, effective, etc. to restore *another* system introduces a
completely different objective, does it not?

No. Every system must include both functions: backup and restore. If
you can back up everything, but you cannot restore it again, the
backup is useless. While it is true that a backup of everything might
help if you want to _restore_ everything unconditionally, if you have
a need to only selectively restore certain data, being constrained to
restore everything is as bad as not being able to restore anything at
all.

For example, if your computer fails, and you are forced to buy new
hardware that doesn't precisely match the old, you must be able to
selectively restore data from the old computer so that all
hardware-independent information is restored, but hardware-dependent
information is not. That way you can configure the new hardware and
then overlay it with all other restored data without corrupting your
new hardware configuration. If you simply restore the Windows
registry wholesale, you restore all the software _and_ hardware
configuration data, blasting the new configuration for the machine and
potentially making the machine unusable.

Anyway, should the user
completely revamp his/her hardware, programs, etc. etc., wouldn't the user
simply make a clone of his/her new system along the lines I've described?

A clone works if you will always restore to identical hardware. But
since hardware changes daily, the chances of being able to restore to
identical hardware after a system has been running for several years
are very slim. You therefore need the ability to selectively restore.

Being able to selectively back up data isn't that big a deal, its only
advantage being that you can reduce the size of your backups that way.
But being able to restore selectively is extremely important. You may
wish to only restore certain files or directories, or you may wish to
restore only certain branches of the registry.

It is the absence of any awareness of the uniqueness of the registry
in most backup software that makes the registry such a pain to deal
with. How many backup products can selectively restore only certain
branches in a registry tree? Indeed, how would you even determine
which branches to restore, and which to leave alone?

Why would a user even attempt to use his/her "old" clone to restore to a
different system?

The old system may have failed, and he may have been forced to replace
it with new and significantly different hardware. But he still needs
all the old data and functionality.

Please refer to my remarks above. A clone is a clone is a clone. Obviously
it's designed to be a clone of the system one has cloned from. If the user
subsequently builds a completely new system then he or she will clone the
contents of that new system to another clone would he not?

If he can. But to do that, he has to build an identical system with
identical hardware. If the hardware is not identical, simply
restoring an entire drive from a clone will probably not work.

Honestly, isn't that what we're *really* talking about?

Sometimes. But the computer world changes quickly, and unless you buy
several identical systems and put all but one in storage, there's no
guarantee that you'll ever be able to restore to an identical hardware
platform. By the time one system fails in a way that requires
replacement, there will be no identical replacements available. The
original clone will have to be restored to hardware different from
that on which it originally ran.

For the overwhelming number of users the basic issue is backing
up one's current system.

But backing things up implies being able to restore them. If you
can't do the latter, the former is a waste of time.

Even large companies make this mistake: they back up everything
religiously, but they have no idea how to restore any of what they
back up, because they've never tried. When the real disaster hits,
they find that they can't restore anything in a way that allows them
to build a usable system. Sometimes they can get around it, in time,
sometimes they are stuck.

In Windows, by far the most likely culprit for this type of problem is
the registry, which has to be selectively restored if the hardware
changes. And unfortunately there is very little discipline in the
structure of the registry, so it may be impossible to figure out what
must be restored and what must be left in its "virgin" state on the
new machine.

It nearly goes without saying that when a user clones his/her drive, he/she
must ensure that the drive is malware-free and suffers no system files
corruption.

How does one do that? For that, you need a trusted system that can
analyze the system at risk. If you are analyzing the system at risk
from _within_ that very system, you may not be able to detect all
corruption. Some malware is very good at hiding itself.

If you clone garbage, garbage is what you'll get. Presumably the
cloned drive is virus-free, so that if the working drive subsquently becomes
virus infected, restoring it from that "good" clone represents one of the
basic advantages of the disk cloning process.

A better practice might be to replace the working drive with the
cloned drive by swapping drives, then put the old working drive on
another machine, wipe it clean, and clone the new working drive back
to it. And this must not be done using any software from the old
working drive, since that might be infected.

It can be a complex problem to resolve.

You're really losing me here. Hopefully, my remarks directly above have
clarified the issue for you.

I've actually had problems like this, in the distant, misty past. The
central problem is that you cannot trust anything that has been
infected, including any OS that resides on the infected device. Since
most PCs have only one OS that _does_ reside on the (only) disk drive,
it isn't completely safe to do anything with them if you want to
eliminate infection entirely. Most malware is not this sophisticated,
but if it is, you have a serious problem.

I'm glad to hear that virus infection is not particularly troubling for you.
But believe me, it is for many, many computer users.

They execute untrustworthy code. They click on attachments, they
download ActiveX components, etc. At some point, they do something
explicit that causes the infection.

Some software can be configured to execute code implicitly, but this
can usually be turned off. I switched from Outlook Express to The Bat
because OE didn't allow me to turn off HTML mail completely, and it's
too easy for executable code to sneak into HTML (even though I turned
everything off in the Restricted Zone and set OE to use this zone).

And it's here that the virus-free cloned drive is especially valuable.

Yes, but you have to keep it away from infected machines when you copy
it back. It would be nice to be able to block all writes to a drive
with a hardware switch for this type of situation. Then there would
be no way to infect a cloned drive at all, period, and anything
restored from it (using trusted software, which is no easy task) would
be clean.

So let's say that the user builds a new machine with different hardware, say
a new motherboard, a new processor, new RAM, new HD, etc. -- in short, a new
system. The cloned drive could *still* be used to clone the contents of
the old drive back to the new system.

What about the registry? Some things in the registry are
hardware-dependent, and must not be changed by the restore; other
things are hardware-independent, and must be restored. But these
things are mixed in haphazard fashion in the _same file_. How do you
select what to restore and what not to restore?

Sure, after doing so, the user would
presumably need to install (or reinstall) whatever drivers are necessary for
the new system. But his/her precious programs/data would be intact. And
there's no reason why that newly-cloned drive would not be bootable. There
may be activation issues, of course, assuming we're dealing with Windows XP,
but that's another issue.

The old cloned content may point to software on a drive that no longer
exists, for example. Windows can boot in safe mode with a generic
video driver, so a video driver mismatch is survivable, but other
drivers don't have that protection (as far as I know).

As to "performance" - I take it you're referring to speed of cloning, yes?

No, I mean the speed of the drive (access time, transfer rates). Are
removable drives slower?

Using medium to high-powered processors and modern hard drives, cloning
speed will be somewhere around 1.5 GB/min. Not breakneck speed by any
stretch, but I would guess sufficient for most users. And the nice thing
about the cloning process is that the user need not be in attendance during
most of the process. Once he/she initiates the process, it automatically
performs the cloning process.

This raises another question: since the system is presumably running
and still writing to the working drive, how do you ensure that the
clone is a coherent copy of the working disk?

Some software can take a snapshot of the entire system and use that to
copy the clone, but this requires OS support that isn't always
present. I know the latest version of my FreeBSD UNIX OS does this.
It looks like Windows backup may also be doing something similar, but
I'm not sure. If it isn't done, though, you can get incoherencies in
the clone that may be impossible to resolve. This is especially true
for things like databases, although usually that's more of an issue on
servers than on desktops (on desktops you can often simply stop
processes that are actively modifying disk data).

As to cost, as I mentioned above - about $100 to $150 for the two mobile
racks, the additional HD, and the cloning software.

That doesn't sound too bad.

There shouldn't be a booting problem at all. As I stated above, after the
contents of the cloned drive has been cloned to the new system, it will
probably will be necessary to install a new video card driver in the example
you've given, but there should be no boot problem at all.

What if the driver is something you need just to get the system up and
running? Windows safe mode was invented to deal with this sort of
issue, but unfortunately it's not foolproof (as far as I know).

That's correct. The hard drives are ordinary PATA or SATA drives, nothing
special about them. You just plop them in the tray (caddy), make two simple
connections (power & data cable), and slide the tray into the mobile rack
(which has been installed in the case's 5 1/4" bay, just like a CD-ROM).
Takes about 30 seconds. Obviously you would want the same make/model for the
two mobile racks so that the inner trays would be interchangeable.

So the racks have some sort of sockets that made with the caddies, and
you just bolt in the drive of your choice and thereafter you can plug
and unplug?

That sounds like a cool idea.

I truly hope you seriously consider this hardware configuration.

I'll certainly look into it, as the tape backup situation is getting
more and more out of sync with the real-world requirements of backup
for desktop systems (it still works fine for servers, though, if you
have the money).

Obviously that's a decision you have to make based on your particular
circumstances. As I've indicated above, we're not talking "big bucks" here.

I know, but I'm really poor. I just replaced this desktop because I
had no choice (hardware failure on the old one), and I'm not even sure
how I'm going to pay for that. So every dollar is a problem.

Equipping one's desktop computer with two removable hard drives is not the
"wave of the future", rather, it's here & now.

I'm not so sure. I don't know _anyone_ outside of a few geeks who
does _any_ kind of backup of his or her desktop machine, much less
anyone who is using removable drives to accomplish it.

This, incidentally, is the reason why most digital photos today will
be lost: they are all stored on disk drives that are never backed up,
and once those drives fail, all the photos they contain will go away.

kony writes:

Raided drives using PCI card not motherboard dependant (plus
identical spare raid card), a 3rd copy on non-raided drives
(offline system only plugged into lan or power for this
purpose), a 4th copy on DVD (formerly CDR). 3rd copy
updated less often, 4th even less. Then there's basic
records and such, smaller file sets also on flash media.
Basically the plan revolves around getting the more frequent
backups done quicker as I find that makes it more likely to
get done regularly.

Sounds pretty stable. Is this for a desktop system or a server?

Tape made more sense in the past, IMO,
but after HDD prices plummeted per capacity they can be
cheap to throw into old boxes- plus "old" boxes are quite a
bit more suitable since it's been a few years since the
typical board started supporting 48bit LBA, large HDDs.

Removable disks seem like an intelligent choice. I'm just looking
into the cost and difficulty of getting it to work for me. I was
thinking that a removable external disk would work, coupled with
software that can completely clone the working drive to the external
disk periodically. That would provide pretty good protection against
drive failure, and fair protection against destruction of the machine
(depending mainly on how closely a replacement machine could match the
original hardware). It doesn't provide non-stop uptime, but I don't
need that on a desktop; as long as I can be up and running within 2-4
hours, that would suffice.

Ted writes:

Softwa Acronis True Image 8. Nice easy to use software. (also offers good
recovery prog which I used to recover my daughters lappy when Windoz went
walkies)

Several people have talked about Acronis, so I'm considering that, if
I can come up with $49.

What about UNIX? What would be the equivalent for that? I think that
standard dump may well do the job, if I have enough spare space on a
drive--I could just dump everything to one huge file, and then copy
the file somewhere for safekeeping.

Indeed, since I have two machines, conceivably I could save one with
Acronis and the other with dump, then copy the resulting files over
the LAN to the opposite machines. That way, unless all disk drives in
both machines fail at the same time, I'm fully covered. Does that
make sense?