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just setup a RAID-0, choosing a backup solution

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Hon1nbo

Tue Dec 28 2010, 08:13AM

Registered Member #902 Joined: Sun Jul 15 2007, 08:17PM
Location: North Texas
Posts: 1040

hey guys,
I was planning on a RAID-0-1 system, but budget constraints have me deciding on something else. I currently have my RAID-0 with 2x 1TB Hitachi Deskstar 7.2k drives up and running beautifully.

My plan is to use an internal 2TB disk as backup, but I am deciding what method/programs to use for the backup. I want to make a full image of the drives. I may still be able to pull off a 0-1 as I found my drives really cheap via OEM but now that it's setup I think it's too late (or can I add in the RAID-1 after the fact if I use a separate RAID controller?)

Assuming I use the 2TB disk, what would you recommend as a practical and efficient backup program? - I plan to backup once a week if I can find time, but I'd rather not have to rewrite the entire 2TB each time so a program that looks for changes might be nice.

Setup:

Asus X58 sabertooth Motherboard (RAID-0 done though the SATA-III Controller)
i7-950 OC'd to 4GHz
4 GB OCZ gold Low Voltage Ram (will be upgrading within the month to more)
60 GB OCZ Agility II SSD (Boot drive)
2x 1 TB Hitachi Deskstar 7200 RPM in RAID-0
2x EVGA GTS 450 GPUs in SLi
temporarily one Galaxy GTS 210 as a PhysX card

Windows 7 Ultimate (which overwrote my Dual Boot with Ubuntu, so only this until I can fix my GRUB menu)

-Jimmy

Nicko

Tue Dec 28 2010, 12:59PM

Registered Member #1334 Joined: Tue Feb 19 2008, 04:37PM
Location: Nr. London, UK
Posts: 615

I swear by Acronis TrueImage

. Just the best. Use it at work for selected PCs and on all PCs & servers & home to a small RAID 1 SAN (2 x 2Tb DNS-323).

Does everything, and really easily & reliably too - schedules/differentials/incrementals/recovery etc. & you can mount the save sets as virtual disks, even when on a non-FAT SAN, and access them in explorer normally.

Love it.

Cheers

Shrad

Tue Dec 28 2010, 10:01PM

Registered Member #3215 Joined: Sun Sept 19 2010, 08:42PM
Location:
Posts: 780

you should try clonezilla

you may download it from sourceforge, it's free and where acronis fails, it wont (we use this at work now and it will cope with anything you may want)

Carbon_Rod

Wed Dec 29 2010, 02:58AM

Registered Member #65 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:43AM
Location:
Posts: 1155

Prefer rsync over SSH tunneled through IPSec to a RAID1 NAS for simple file copy.

Supports Linux, Win, and MacOS...

Disk imaging solutions are a dangerous backup policy...
;-P

Nicko

Wed Dec 29 2010, 06:42AM

Registered Member #1334 Joined: Tue Feb 19 2008, 04:37PM
Location: Nr. London, UK
Posts: 615

Shrad wrote ...

you should try clonezilla

you may download it from sourceforge, it's free and where acronis fails, it wont (we use this at work now and it will cope with anything you may want)

I've never had Acronis fail in probably 200+ installations.

Clonezilla is a software deployment tool really and has major limitations for use in straight backup. To quote from its home page:

Differential/incremental backup is not implemented yet.

Online imaging/cloning is not implemented yet. The partition to be imaged or cloned has to be unmounted.

Software RAID/fake RAID is not supported by default. It's can be done manually only.

Due to the image format limitation, the image can not be explored or mounted. You can _NOT_ recovery single file from the image. However, you still have workaround to make it, read this.

Recovery Clonezilla live with multiple CDs or DVDs is not implemented yet. Now all the files have to be in one CD or DVD if you choose to create the recovery iso file.

So its a straight clone tool for unmounted disks which is not what the OP asked for. Acronis happily does on-line differentials & incrementals (in the background), allows you to mount & browse save sets like any other disk (automatically reconnects differential & incrementals save sets) - this means that you can drag and drop files out of your backups in seconds. Many other tools included too.

I used to run the IT for a fairly large financial company - we tested pretty much all the on-line PC tools available, and Acronis won hands down. There's a reason it regularly wins most shoot-out comparisons by the PC mags etc.

Steve Conner

Wed Dec 29 2010, 09:25AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

I used Acronis on Nicko's recommendations. I got the latest version, 2010 or whatever.

So far I've had one corrupted incremental backup that forced me to fall back to a previous one, and another situation where the bootable restore CD corrupted the hard disk on a brand new machine, getting me into trouble with the IT department. I found the UI generally slow and flakey, and the facility for mounting backup images in Explorer just plain confusing.

All of this is within the "sh!t happens" tolerance though. The Acronis software itself could be perfectly OK. It passed the disaster recovery drill, I'm still using it to image all of my work machines to a hard disk in our file server, and it seems to be going smoothly after the teething troubles.

I used to use Rsync and SSH extensively, with a Linux server and Cygwin on the client side, and it worked very well for me. But this is synchronization, not backup. It will merrily sync corrupted and infected files over your precious originals. You need to understand the difference when implementing a backup strategy.

And probably also take a disk image now and again, to save you reinstalling your OS from scratch, and safeguard those weird files that you forgot to synchronise because they live in some crazy directory.

Although with Windows it's often a good thing to reinstall from scratch now and again.

Nicko

Wed Dec 29 2010, 01:25PM

Registered Member #1334 Joined: Tue Feb 19 2008, 04:37PM
Location: Nr. London, UK
Posts: 615

Steve McConner wrote ...

Although with Windows it's often a good thing to reinstall from scratch now and again.

I firmly believe that, certainly with XP onwards, that this is apocryphal - Of the literally many 100s of (possibly over 1000) systems running XP & later I have been responsible for, only a handful have ever needed rebuilding, normally due to a catastrophic drive failure. I've never had to rebuild any of my domestic systems - they run AVG anti-virus, no local admin privs, once-weekly scheduled Ccleaner, MalwareBytes & defrag. Easy to set up, then forget (just let them run).

The main problems people experience are caused by crappy 3rd party drivers, poor security (viruses etc.), and power problems (power cut during a big disk write etc. with no UPS). Not doing basic housekeeping will clog things up a bit, just like if you never cleaned your house for 5 years - it, too, would get pretty mucky. Let's not pretend for a moment that other systems, even, dare I say it, Linux-based, don't have similar problems...

Not giving users local admin privs is a good start! (stops nasty web pages killing your environment) - do all Linux users run as su?

Steve Conner

Wed Dec 29 2010, 02:01PM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Well, in a single user environment, XP can indeed run happily for years on end without any degradation. But there is one issue that I've seen for real.

The IT guys at work administer student computer labs where hundreds of different students can log into any given machine over the course of a semester. Every time someone logs on who the computer hasn't seen before, it builds them a home directory and adds a section to the registry for their preferences.

Now, the fatal flaw of the 2000/NT/XP family is that there's just one system-wide registry. Anything you install adds to it, and the bigger it gets, the slower the system runs, because every program has to search through all of it to find the key it wants. Linux avoids this by scattering the preferences and settings through hundreds of .rc files that you have to edit by hand, except you can never find them. Somewhat like Douglas Adams' "Beware of the Leopard" filing cabinet.

So these machines ended up with huge registries and really started to chug by the end of term.

The solution they came up with was to use Deep Freeze.

Pinky's Brain

Wed Dec 29 2010, 03:26PM

Registered Member #2901 Joined: Thu Jun 03 2010, 01:25PM
Location:
Posts: 837

Nicko wrote ...
Let's not pretend for a moment that other systems, even, dare I say it, Linux-based, don't have similar problems...

I have done nearly transparant distribution updates of a Debian machine from a single install across multiple iterations of hardware for nearly a decade, all from the comfort of SSH.

Of course I still run windows for my desktop :)

Carbon_Rod

Thu Dec 30 2010, 06:45AM

Registered Member #65 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:43AM
Location:
Posts: 1155

There is a native executable for almost every desktop OS, and rsync incremental backup is secure, and quite fast as you can skip compression of media files etc.

Incremental backups allow you to roll back in time, but note OS deployment systems are not a backup policy.

I agree Debian+Xen+VLM incremental snapshots are the exception, but people don't use this for a regular desktop OS.

If you use Windows 7 or MacOSX it comes pre-rooted depending on the source.

This year is the year of the DRDOS Desktop...

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