So I lost a hard drive...

[swbluto]

Does anybody know of a good free backup program to make like a "clone" of the original hard-drive and put it on another hard-drive? It seems so easy to implement, that it's hard to believe it doesn't exist. I think my google results are just being swamped by commerical results by the sheer market size of the back-up and data protection industry.

 

[AussieJester]

Norton Ghost might be what your after...

KiM

 

[paultrafalgar]

dd command in Linux. You don't have Linux? You could put a small Linux on a pendrive and boot off that to do your backup. Look at BartPE in Google.

 

[tailwind]

Glad you got your files back.

I was going to suggest installing the drive vertically or upside down.

We did an office move in the early 90s. One of the workstations/servers held a lot of seismic exploration data and always ran 24/7.

We had a hardware engineer with us to help with the move. When I arrived at the new office half the drives would not spin up. The drives had cooled down during the move and refused to play nice. The engineers solution was to take the bottom off each drive and hit the spindle square on with the handle end of his screw driver. I am glad he knew what he was doing!

All the drives came back except one which needed a bit more persuasion.

Both the newer P55 motherboards from Gigabyte and Asus have hardware RAID 0 and RAID 1 for two attached SATA drives.

RAID 1 or 5 will not help if you accidentally delete data.

I am upgrading from Win98 to Win7 and to a new PC in a month or two. Didnt like XP or Vista.

My backup plan is,

- occasionally backup data to DVD,

- buy a hugh 2TB external drive connected via eSATA. Take a snapshot of the system and then just backup the data partitions on a regular basis. When the drive fills up, delete some of the old data backups to make room for the new.
Most of the time the drive will live in the cupboard and not connected to the PC.

Greg

 

[swbluto]

I'm trying to find something that'll automatically back-up once every so often, like a week. I know if I give myself a schedule on something that doesn't seem immediately critical ("The back up can wait until next week..."), I tend to forget or lapse on it.

 

[amberwolf]

Most OSs have a scheduler built in, to start a program running at a specified time/date, singly or repeatedly. Just use whatever program you find most handy, even if it doesn't itself have a scheduler, and just use the one in your OS.

 

[dogman dan]

The freezer trick worked for me last summer, when a computer about 5 years old started having problems with the drive. I had about 700 music cd files on there, and only about 500 of em backed up due to lack of space. 99% of it was also on an I pod, and most of the actual disks in a closet somewhere in the house.

After a good freeze, I got it running long enough to spit the documents and music files into a new 1 terrabyte archives drive. Whew, it had taken me about two weeks of ripping CD's into the computer every waking moment to get them into the ipod the first time, and I didn't relish doing it again. About 7000 tracks or so.

Really valuable stuff like scans of pictures going back 40 years, digital shots more recent, etc was already backed up, in some cases in multiple locations.

 

[Link]

Link, you didn't have a backup of your data disc/partition?!
But you will always have a backup of your data partition in future, won't you!!???? :wink:

I had no suitably-sized drive to put the stuff on. Would have been all on DVDs, but I didn't fancy having to either buy 40 DVD-RWs or throw away 40 normal DVDs every time I went to back stuff up again.

I found an 80GB external HDD lying around and put everything that would fit onto it (everything but the backups/installers folder [10GB] and games folder [~35GB]), but I'm thinking of getting a 640GB Caviar Black to use as a not-always-connected backup drive until the 250GB fills up and using this 120GB Maxtor I've got hooked up as the OS drive permanently. RAID 1 seems like kind of a waste of good space if you keep backups and don't have anything SUPER critical on the drives (E.G. you run a small business server), and RAID 5 requires some pricey hardware, to say the least. Maybe someday...:?

BTW, if anyone knows of a program that can image an entire physical drive (boot sector and all), let me know. It'd make the OS reinstall I do every so often far easier.

Anyway, looking at this drive, it doesn't look like anything went TOO wrong, but there was this...sort of rust-like oxide near where the electronics contact to the r/w head interface. Kind of wish I hadn't taken the whole drive apart first, just so I could see if it'd work after I wiped it off. Lul.

I am upgrading from Win98 to Win7 and to a new PC in a month or two. Didnt like XP or Vista.

WTF didn't like XP? Madness.


Oh, and, for the record, I only have 233MB of...explicit material on this computer. Never really got into the stuff, so all I have is a collection of furry. Some people collect stamps, I collect pics of anthropomorphs. Go figure.

 

[AussieJester]

yeah i chuckled at the dislike of XP comment was huge improvement on Win98 IMO...I loved Vista also but win7 is the best thing they have released since win 95 IMHO

KiM

 

[paultrafalgar]

BTW, if anyone knows of a program that can image an entire physical drive (boot sector and all), let me know. It'd make the OS reinstall I do every so often far easier.

That's exactly what you do with Drivesnapshot. Every couple of weeks I take a backup with it of the root (OS) partition. When ever I get "funny business" (viruses?) happening, I do a restore from the last backup. Prior to this you make a CD or pendrive that will boot the machine with a copy of Drivesnapshot on it. Viola, you do a restore (10 minutes ish) and reboot.
But you don't want to try it free even, do you? :wink:
P.S. Don't just use one partition on a disk! Have a 6-9 GByte partition for the OS. Put other stuff on separate partitions e.g. I have Graphics, Video, Sound, Data and Backup as separate partitions. All smaller, so quicker to backup and restore.
But you wouldn't do that would you?

 

[Miles]

BTW, if anyone knows of a program that can image an entire physical drive (boot sector and all), let me know. It'd make the OS reinstall I do every so often far easier.

I use this: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/ You need to make a separate boot disc.

 

[Link]

But you don't want to try it free even, do you?

Trying it now...

But you wouldn't do that would you?

Already do. OSs have their own partitions on separate disc, all my actual stuff is on another, and I'll have a third, 640GB drive to back up both with in a few days.


Acronis I've heard mentioned before elsewhere...mebbe try if it this doesn't work out for some reason. T/y, guys.

 

[tailwind]

Drive Backup from Paragon Software has a free version of their software.

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/db-express/index.html


Look under "Full features ..." to see what is supported in the free version.

Look under "Upgrade Now" for differences between the Free version and the Personal edition.

Greg

 

[1of3]

win7 is the best thing they have released since win 95

what makes it best....?

 

[mwkeefer]

Link,

Where are you with this??

The problem is ( If I remember correctly) that this isn't his OS disk but his data partition / drive. You need to bite the bullet and do the Raid 0... then archive / backup of the data drive is basically "optional" and only to protect against physical damage from fire, etc.

For doing backups (that can be easily restored) may I suggest you look at System Rescue CD (latest version, just google it)... this is a bootable linux utility disk with gparted (replacement for partition magic) and Partimage which is an open source Ghost knock off. The point is these utilities work, I've used them for years.. and even better they are free and well documented on the net (even their use under Windows XP/Vista/7).

Remember since your data drive is movies, sound, images, etc.. these don't compress very well (the file formats have compression built in) so to archive your data disk would take an awful lot of backup space.

Again... I would just raid mirror the darn things and be done with it!

-Mike

 

[paultrafalgar]

But you don't want to try it free even, do you?

Trying it now...

Well, how'd it go, Link? We need a review

 

[swbluto]

I'm "trying" Norton Ghost and it seems to do the job well. I like how you don't have to restart the system to backup the entire drive, and it's already saved my rump once. Although... if you want to do a complete recovery on a given drive that's currently running the only operating system that's available on the machine, it seems like you have to burn a boot CD. I kind of wonder if Norton could be ran from bartPE? (Or some other form of unofficial Windows Live CD)

 

[paultrafalgar]

That's how I run Drivesnapshot, from a pendrive with BartPE with Drivesnapshot on it. Boot up with pendrive plugged in and also a USB connected external hard drive. Backup to the external drive and restore from it. Even if the machine becomes unbootable that method will recover your bacon

 

[mud2005]

Got my Samsung 1.5TB drives all setup and they work great Using Ubuntu, did a fsck and they checked out fine.
Not using raid this time as I had problems last time (long story) so this time using grsyc which is rsync w/ a gui and it works freakin perfectly syncs both drives really quickly and gives output of what it copied and/or deleted.

Now I'm going to partition my original 500GB drive in many partitions and mulit-boot windows, many different linuxes, and maybe even mac if I get around to it

 

[mwkeefer]

If you can get it... the dos bootable version of Ghost 8 and up will handle full imaging of your disk and even does compression for the archive images (adjustable level) and things like DVD spanning.

I've had Ghost forever... I normally make a bootable CD or USB drive with a copy of Ghost on it... connect an external USB2 or eSata drive (sometimes I use a second internal backup drive) and I boot to a dos/ghost. Don't let the dos part scare you... not really dos just text mode.

In either case, ghost is nice as you can do streaming restorations over network,etc.

-Mike

 

[Link]

But you don't want to try it free even, do you?

Trying it now...

Well, how'd it go, Link? We need a review

I would, but around the time I was going to, I managed to...er...dump water filled with copper and silver ions all over my video card. It sort of crapped out for a couple days until it totally dried out. I wanted the image to be totally fresh, and that combined with the getting of a new case sort of tossed that out the window. Figure I'll do it proper when I reinstall everything. Pic of current setup in the meantime.

Note that the desk was totally cleaned and reorganized the day before that was taken

 

[317537]

LOL I note the neatly placed screw dirver near the mouse and next to the mouse is the breakfast bowl.

Not too bad. We have 5 pcs online. Just some old dogs ears ive kept running and a couple of new ones.

 

[ngocthach1130]

The problem is ( If I remember correctly) that this isn't his OS disk but his data partition / drive. You need to bite the bullet and do the Raid 0

If I recall correctly. What he needs is a Raid 1 setup not Raid 0. Raid 0 is for gamers where datas is distributed on multiple disk to allow faster access time. Raid 1 is 1:1 mirror image. Any error need to be corrected quickly or you run into corrupted data being mirrored to the other drive.

Got my Samsung 1.5TB drives all setup and they work great

Aren't those 1.5TB disk the one with bad firmware problem recently?

To reduce on HD failure you should disable virtual memory/file paging.

 

[mud2005]

Aren't those 1.5TB disk the one with bad firmware problem recently?

as far as I know it was the Seagate drives that had the firmware problem not the Samsung.