Computer hardware question

2.5in IDE drives are all the same so you should just be able to plug in another one and GO! it really is that easy!

David

You back up once an hour? Crikey. I am intrigued as to what application requires this level of security -- is it something of excessively high financial or safety value?

And did you not consider a RAID setup to give you hardware redundncy? That would be more normal in highly critical situations I think.

Matthew

What frightens me about raid is that a mistake or corruption on one is copied to the other, making the whole pretty useless in that scenario.
I use HandyBackup and it does it in the background, so no reason why not to do it every hour. It actually backs up 3 different sets in 3 places. One is a mirror of my documents folder, and another is slightly different - but I have deleted letters (usually when using a previous one as a follow on and forgetting to save it "as new" and just pressing Save - deleting the original - Dohhh) and it allows me to retrieve them.
Thanks David. I'm off to get one.
It isn't high risk stuff - but I know the time lost when things go wrong, and I can't afford to lose a few days work.

Should be that simple.. the boxes are usually dumb.. like when people want external DVD burners.. £120 for pre-built burner or £40 for drive plus £25 for case.. guess people buy them though!

Paul

quote:

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Originally posted by Rasher:
What frightens me about raid is that a mistake or corruption on one is copied to the other, making the whole pretty useless in that scenario.
... I have deleted letters (usually when using a previous one as a follow on and forgetting to save it "as new" and just pressing Save - deleting the original - Dohhh) and it allows me to retrieve them.

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This is why I love Norton GoBack (previously a Roxio product).

It tracks every change you make on your machine. If you overwrite a file you can just go into Windows Explorer, right click it, and retrieve a copy of the file as it was some hours or days earlier.

It can also get you out of sticky situations where some change (or virus) has stopped the machine from booting, or an application install has simply screwed up and uninstall hasn't fixed it. Any of these can be resolved by reverting the whole hard drive back to some earlier point in time (this morning's boot-up is usually favourite, but there's often a more recent version available). I can usually revert back at least a few days in case of more severe problems.

It would still be worth using your external drive for backup, as GoBack cannot help in the situation of a duff drive, such as you've just experienced.


BTW, just one note of warning re 2.5" drives - older ones are 12mm tall, and newer ones are 9.5mm tall. A 9.5mm drive will fit into a 12mm slot, although it might rattle around a bit unless you pad it out. However, I would guess that your 20GB drive is almost certainly 9.5mm.

AFAICT, Fujitsu's are about the slowest of the 2.5" drives.


Going back to basics, you can probably buy a 3.5" 120GB-160GB drive + a 3.5" caddy for the same price as you will pay for an 80GB 2.5" bare drive to go into your existing caddy. (And you get to keep your 20GB drive in it's existing caddy, too).

cheers, Martin

E-mail:- MartinPayne (at) Dial.Pipex.com. Put "Naim" in the title.

"so no reason why not to do it every hour"

Well there is inevitably a performance hit and the not inconsiderable extra usage will increase your risk of actually having a hard disk failure.

"What frightens me about raid is that a mistake or corruption on one is copied to the other"

Which is exactly the same situation you have with your external drive, surely? Except you have an hour's lag compared to RAID. RAID is more about protecting you from catastrophic hardward failure than backup or data integrity issues.

Also if your data is that valuauable that you need to back it up so often, then you should probably consider some scheme that allows you to do physically separate backups over time (i.e. so you have a rolling daily backup for the last week, a weekly backup for the last month, etc) and some kind of off-site and/or fire safe storage for these.

I've never used GoBack but it does seem to offer the sort of belt & braces second guessing type data integrity thing that you are after.

Matthew

Rasher

Sent you an unrelated PM.

Hmm, surely this would depend on the version of RAID which was being implemented.

Yes there are various flavours of Raid, and I guess now that a mirror raid would have been perfect for this event. I may set this up in the future and use the external drive to do the hourly backups.
I'll check out the 3.5" drive & caddy option, although it will be heavier and I do walk to work when I can (it lives in my briefcase when office is closed).
I worked for a firm a while back that hadn't backed up anything for years. They lost it all and still suffer from having to do jobs again from scratch when clients come back for more work. God knows what happened to their accounts. I had taken it upon myself to back up most of their work, but they pissed me off so I didn't tell them.
I feel quite smug at having avoided disaster.

[This message was edited by Rasher on Wed 08 September 2004 at 14:12.]