Backup ideas, no down time needed.

Percy1983

Ok firstly I am running 2 500gb hard drives in a raid 0 to which one has started clicking on startup, its current running fine and passes all tests. Of course it would be stupid to ignore this problem and I have checked and I still have a warrenty on both hard drives.

Now the simple answer is backup send hard drive away and then restore, but I have a big problem as this has happened at the wrong time really. In short I do charity work for a local school and produce shows etc (the nativity this time, shocking I know) and in short I can't afford down time as deadlines are so tight anyway.

Now I have my hands on a 1.5TB USB hard drive so can do a full backup but the question is can I make a fully bootable backup on the USB drive and update it everyday so if my hard drive does fail I can boot up form there (with slightly hobbled performance I know).

By all means it will all be over in a week and half to which I will pull the faulty drive and send it off, but in the meantime whats the best way of making a backup.

Would synctoy do the job? I know it would backup and then update as needed but would a raw copy of everything be all I need, I have checked and my motherboard can boot from USB.

Sorry for the long post, just a bit worried about letting the children down, they are very young and won't understand 'sorry my hard drive failed'

juliand

These software products do what you describe, but I'm unaware of anything that's free.

Norton Ghost
Website: uk.norton.com/ghost
Acronis True Image
Website: acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/index.html

Percy1983

Sorry the overnight backups is fine, I mean more no downtime if my hard drive does die as in I can boot straight from my USB backup and continue (ok maybe lose a few hours depending when it dies).

Basically if it does die I don't have time to find another hard drive and rebuild the raid array or time to restore a backup, in short I want my backup to be a working backup and not a compressed image of any sort if that makes sense.

With that say if I used clonezilla to make a disk image could it be mounted, booted and used?

HO87

If the clicking is at start-up and randomly includes minor screen freezes - check your sata cables.

Percy1983

Right now it only clicks at cold start up and is causing no problems, I have double checked all connections. I believe it to be a parking issue which may not cause a problem for a while but I need to be sure I have a working computer for the next few weeks. My raid array is still perfectly healthly for the time being thankfully.

Any other programs which will do more of a mirrored sync backup? as with synctoy the inital backup will take a while but from that point I could click go every few hours and it will just update what has changed.

Hopefully it will be fine for the next few weeks and I am worrying over nothing.

Percy1983

That actually sounds a decent plan, my main concern is there is many programs I use in producing the show to which to reinstall them all would be quite a pain.

The work I need to do really kicks in on friday, to which I couldn't send this off and get a replacement in such a short time, trust me that is what I want to do.

As I say fingers crossed it will kepp going for another 1.5 weeks then I can whatever I need to do.

The other problem is I really need the raid performance to work effectively as I sync 4 HD video streams and switch between them to which the bandwidth is quite high, so if it can at least egt me past the editing phase the rest is just burning, witht hat I burn discs in 4's not sure on the bandwidth needed for that, hopefully that won't be a problem.

sharkie

http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/virtual.htm this should work, but have not tried it.

only till tomorrow 10am http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-samsung-hd204ui-z4-spinpoint-ecogreen-f4eg-sata-3gb-s-32mb-cache-89-ms-ncq

2T for £69.30 Inc VAT - twice as reliable as 2 drives with 4 times the capacity and used approx half the electricity - a winner all round!

simon.griggs

Dear Percy1983,

I personally use Drive Image XML, http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm which is free for personal use. This can image a hard drive in its entirety so containing OS and programs which can be simply restored if a drive fails. You can schedule DI to run as a windows task so it will image during the night and therefore you will always have an image you can restore from.

However, why not invest in a new hard drive, I picked up a 500GB unit this morning for about £31 inc VAT.

I hope this helps

Simon.

paddyrg

4 Hd video streams with a live edit on a PC? It sounds to me like a job more suited to hardware, maybe a tricaster box? That must be one Heck of a PC to even try that on, so I'd imagine you'll be chewing disk up at tens of megabytes a minute, and may want to look at a proper data raid solution as a mirrored pair of internal drives is not going to give you peak recording performance at all, which may explain the failure.

Mirrored discs are slightly slower to write but slightly faster to read. The external 1.5TB drive will be connected via USB I guess, and will not be fast enough to stream recording of 4 hd streams ( unless so compressed they can hardly be considered hd any more!) as 480Mbps is the theoretical maximum, the reality much lower and we are taking about huge volumes of data here!

Percy1983

Interestingly no noises today and all still in good health, either way I am covering myself, hard drives that tick don't last forever.

My PC can do it shockingly, Core2quad Q9550 at 3.6Ghz + 8Gb ram does the trick, if forced onto the USB I will use low resolution proxy files to edit and swap out for the render. The raid 0 is the strip array not mirrored so in theory has twice the speed of a single drive (I know its not in reality) on both reads and writes. With that I don't edit at full playback speed and I demux the audio and master that separately and add it back in the final render.

But yes you are correct the amount of data moving about at any one time amazing, but my trusty PC always does it, I will add my PC doesn't do this for a living and only gets such abuse for about 7 hours a year so my hard drives don't usually get too much strain. The drives in question are 2.5 years old so shouldn't be failing but could have been destined too anyway.

Those who mention single drives I need to run 2 in a raid array to get the performance I need, and likewise I can't just replace one without rebuillding the array.

Either way the filming is friday so I best get backing up, thanks to all who have made suggestions I will give a few things a go and see what works best.

Percy1983

Tried clonezilla and it didn't work, on drive to drive it doesn't see my raid array as a single drive, on partition to partition it need seem ok and could see it as 1 partition so I left it over night and the backup just isn't valid, my only option is to format the drive.

Set sync toy doing a full copy but I get a feeling that won't quite copy everything while within wondows.