Acronis

[intradaybill]

Quote from surfer25:

If you do not use RAID, the best solution by far is to just clone your drive to a mirror drive once a week. The use Acronis or some backup software to do incremental backups to DVD every night during the week. If your drive ever fails you can be back up and running in 15 minutes.

This method has saved me a number of times with almost no hassle.

1. Acronis or any of the free cloning software that comes with your drive will work fine for the cloning.
2. Acronis or any reliable backup software can be used to make one base backup and the subsequent incremental backups.

With the price of hard drives nowadays, there is no reason to use disc images for backups.

Fine but this is a lot of work. There must be some automated way of doing it that does not involve staring backup software. I heard of hot swap. Does anyone know anyhting about this?

What I basically want to do is to add a second disk and have an automatic process for mirroring the main disk to that. In case of failure, I switch disks and add a new backup disk. I am looking for software to do this. Acronis cloning involves formatting the disk and running on startup. It also takes too long.

 

[moonriver]

That's what I use: Casper
http://www.fssdev.com/

Excerpt from their website:

SmartClone™ Technology -- dramatically reduces the time required to update a backup. Casper's innovative SmartClone technology enables Casper to maintain a complete backup replacement hard disk for your system in the same amount of time required by other backup and disk imaging solutions to perform a partial or incremental backup to a proprietary archive!

Integrated Scheduling -- performs backups automatically on a routine basis. Casper's integrated scheduling ensures your backup is always up-to-date. You can schedule copies to be performed daily, weekly, monthly, or at any time desired.

 

[Scataphagos]

Quote from surfer25:

"... With the price of hard drives nowadays, there is no reason to use disc images for backups.

Actually, there is. What do you do when you discover your backup clone is corrupted or has old errors you didn't notice before?

Usually one will have only 1 or 2 spare HDDs to be clones.. and that will be enough almost always.

There is merit in having several images going back over several months or even a year... I use 2 external HDDs to make images and alternate them monthly. Twice I've had external HDDs fail.

 

[surfer25]

Quote from moonriver:

That's what I use: Casper
http://www.fssdev.com/

A number of years ago, I tested and used Casper for disk cloning and it seemed to work very well. I suspect it is more stable and better coded than Acronis.

Do you always keep your mirror disk attached? The reason I ask is because it is possible that you can encounter serious problems if two disks containing the operating system are both attached at the same time. (I am not referring to a RAID configuration).

Thanks.

 

[surfer25]

Quote from Scataphagos:

Actually, there is. What do you do when you discover your backup clone is corrupted or has old errors you didn't notice before?

Usually one will have only 1 or 2 spare HDDs to be clones.. and that will be enough almost always.

There is merit in having several images going back over several months or even a year... I use 2 external HDDs to make images and alternate them monthly. Twice I've had external HDDs fail.

This is a good point, and I do have a solution for that situation. I do a periodic backup to DVD of all important data, and keep a copy offsite. If the worst happens and I have no workable mirror drive, I can rebuild the computer, install the operating system and drivers, and use the data backup. That has not been necessary since I began using two mirror drives, one onsite and one off. The worst has been that I've had to update the older mirror with data contained on a recent DVD backup.

I think it is crucial to have a recent DVD backup of all important data stored offsite.

 

[shortie]

have not used it for a few years. I think the last version I used was 9. went through several complete restores without a problem (used image of the whole hdd with OS, etc). have not used any of incremental stuff.

i vaguely recall a problem when another computer would not boot from the image or something like that. i believe it turned out to be a problem of me not following the exact instructions of creating a boot disk (or something like that). the reason i bring this up is to warn people that it is possible to screw things up even though Acronis is easy to use.

 

[rwk]

Quote from surfer25:
I think it is crucial to have a recent DVD backup of all important data stored offsite. [/B]

I do a monthly backup to DVD and store the last 6 copies in the trunk of my car. It's not very elegant, but price is right.

I do a daily full backup of my main computer via Acronis. I am guessing it takes about 20 minutes, as I have it set to run automatically during the dinner hour. I have never had any problem restoring files or an entire drive.

I do a weekly backup of my trading computer. It doesn't change very often.

 

[Scataphagos]

Quote from rwk:

I do a monthly backup to DVD and store the last 6 copies in the trunk of my car. It's not very elegant, but price is right.

I do a daily full backup of my main computer via Acronis. I am guessing it takes about 20 minutes, as I have it set to run automatically during the dinner hour. I have never had any problem restoring files or an entire drive.

I do a weekly backup of my trading computer. It doesn't change very often.

Isn't writing all that to a DVD very slow?

 

[Scataphagos]

Quote from rwk:

"...
I do a daily full backup of my main computer via Acronis. I am guessing it takes about 20 minutes, as I have it set to run automatically during the dinner hour. I have never had any problem restoring files or an entire drive.

Jeez.. I was thinking of an entire drive image. If you're only making data backups, that's not so bad.

I do nightly data backups too... drive imaging is to restore all the other stuff if/when something happens.

 

[rwk]

Quote from Scataphagos:
Jeez.. I was thinking of an entire drive image. If you're only making data backups, that's not so bad.

I do nightly data backups too... drive imaging is to restore all the other stuff if/when something happens.

Right ... key files only. I have my data organized so that everything I most hate to lose is in just 3 or 4 directories. I copy those to DVD monthly, which takes about 15 minutes.