Setup for backups

gooner_47 · Post by **gooner_47** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 12:00 pm

This post will be fairly long so bear with me! I need some help with a good way of organising drives.

1: I was told it's best to have the OS on its own small hard drive, is this true?

2: I am trying to decide whether to have the backup drive placed internally or externally in an enclosure. If it was internal, would there be a risk of both failing at the same time due to some catastrophe or another?

3: Even if it was in external enclosure - it would still be connected to the PC, so could something happen that would still wipe out both drives? Or would you have to disconnect it for safety?

4: I'd want to backup images of the whole hard drive, how long approx do you think this would take (planning on getting 160GB)?

5: I also read that you should place the swap file on a seperate drive to the OS if possible, somewhere where it wouldn't get fragmented easily - so could you make a very small partition on the larger drive just for the swap file? What would be the adv's and disadv's of this?

Thanks for reading it all

any help appreciated

m0002a · Post by **m0002a** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 12:52 pm

1. One way to provide a backup solution is to have your C drive backed up to a second drive (or a partition on a second drive) using a product such as PowerQuest Drive Image. The backup can be compressed about 30-50%. So I am not sure the C drive needs to be small, but just needs to be small enough to backup to the other drive (accounting for how much other stuff you have on 2nd drive).

2. Unlikely both would fail at the same time, unless struck by lightning or something like that. Using a surge protector would help prevent that. Theft or fire would be the other main causes of loosing both drives.

3. Same as #2 above.

4. Depends on many factors. How much of the drive are you using, speed of computer, whether or not you use compression, etc.

5. I would not worry about fragmentation. The main advantage of putting the swap file on a different drive other than C is to off-load work to a different disk if the OS needs to access C and the swap file at the same time. If you have less than 512MB of memory this is more important. Also, you don't need to backup the swap file when you backup you C partition, so putting it on a separate partition alleviates that issue.

If you have 2 drives with non-RAID configuration, and more than one disk controller, it would help if you could put them on separate controllers. This will definitely speed up the drive backups.

|Romeo| · Post by **|Romeo|** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 2:18 pm

1: I was told it's best to have the OS on its own small hard drive, is this true?

The reason for this is to reduce the size of a operating system backup by not including data; and to reduce the size of a data backup by not including the operating system. Mostly, the operating system is not backed up with the same frequency as data that people have created.

2: I am trying to decide whether to have the backup drive placed internally or externally in an enclosure. If it was internal, would there be a risk of both failing at the same time due to some catastrophe or another?

Yes you are at risk. If the power supply suddenly puts 3Kv[1] or so on the 5v rail then both drives will die. Or if a piece of malicous software wipes your drives; it will get both (not so likely as it used to be). This applies if it's external too. And a fire or flood will destroy both. A secure backup needs to be physically disconnected from whatever it is backing up which in practical terms means stored in a sealed & fire proof safe or preferably offsite.

4: I'd want to backup images of the whole hard drive, how long approx do you think this would take (planning on getting 160GB)?

It depends on a number of factors; chiefly how full the drive is, and what you're copying the image to. To take an extreme, it will take a long time to backup the image to 360k floppy discs. It will not take nearly so long to throw put it onto a 15K SCSI drive in the same computer

Compression level will make much less difference than these two factors.

5: I also read that you should place the swap file on a seperate drive to the OS if possible, somewhere where it wouldn't get fragmented easily - so could you make a very small partition on the larger drive just for the swap file? What would be the adv's and disadv's of this?

If you have a second internal drive (physical drive, not partition) & put the pagefile on that, then in certain circumstances you will see a performance increase (specifically, when your computer is performing a write/read on the main hard disk, and simultaneously performing a write/read to the pagefile).

However, if the pagefile gets heavily fragmented; then performance will drop as the drive has to seek. This can happen with the pagefile on the OS or second drive however and the way to avoid it is to create a pagefile large enough for normal use; and then defragment it so that it is contiguous. It's worth noting that a small number of fragments in the pagefile will not produce a serious performance impact.

[1] It was the fault of the electricity company. The figure might not be accurate; no one save the electricity company measured it. I don't think it was that high

mco_chris · Post by **mco_chris** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 3:19 pm

You may want to look into off-site backups. These would be immune from viruses, power failures, bad hardware, etc at your site. I use the "Connected" service (http://www.connected.com/), and there are others like Xdrive.

Off-site backups are kind of expensive, so only some of my data gets backed up there.

My data is very important to me. I have four PC's, two are dedicated to backups. My main PC backs up to the backup PC's using Fileback PC (http://www.maxoutput.com/FileBack/) software. All the PC's are WinXP. The backup PC's have four drives in them - one just for the OS and program files, and three on a SATA controller to hold the backup data. I don't use RAID because if the RAID card died, how would I get the data off the hard drives?

I backup the OS and program files with Acronis True Image to the backup PC's. Every once in a while, I take one of the backup PC's offline and run SpinRite (http://grc.com/spinrite.htm), chkdsk, etc on them to make sure the hard drives are healthy. In my experience, hard drives are the least reliable component of a PC.

I also backup to USB drives that don't remain connected to the network or any PC. This minimizes the effect of bad hardware and viruses and malware.

I used to backup all my data to Firewire drives connected to the main PC, but then you can't run SpinRite or low-level utilities on them. It also makes it easier for viruses and malware to "see" the backup drives. And if the main PC died, it would be harder to recover the data since the restore part of most backup software requires that the drives be directly connected.

My setup minimizes the effects of a hard drive crash, viruses, electrical surges, and hardware failures. The only problem is if my house is destroyed or has no electric for a while.

This actually happened during the hurricanes last year - I was without power for weeks. I moved to a hotel that had power and was able to access my off-site data with a laptop.

Next step is to start storing my USB backup drives in a safe deposit box at a bank. This will help cover loss of house.

Heard a good saying somewhere - do you trust your backups enough to fdisk your hard drive right now?

Backing up it one thing - restoring is another!

pangit · Post by **pangit** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 3:55 pm

A cheap form of external backup is burning to CD/DVD. Unless you're paranoid about your data or it is mission critical for your business you don't need to do it that often.

I have 2 internal drives in my home PC and I set up an automatic weekly (data only) backup from one to the other - no user intervention required. This protects against HDD failure (by far the most likely cause of loss of data). Then once a month or so I backup to CD, which covers the other less likely causes.

I don't do a full image backup as it takes up a lot of time/space, and if my drives crash (as has happened to me twice) it gives me the chance to do a fresh install of WinXP + all my applications. Time consuming but worthwhile IMHO. I also have a Ghost image of WinXP with all patches, drivers but no applications, which speeds things up somewhat.

josephclemente · Post by **josephclemente** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 6:22 pm

At work, I use a USB 2.0 connected removable hard drive setup. 6 hard drives, each in it's own cartridge and rotated daily. A complete backup is performed at the end of each work day. One of the drives is taken off-site each week.

For home, I just use CD's or DVD-R.

gooner_47 · Post by **gooner_47** » Tue Mar 15, 2005 1:39 am

I think I'm leaning towards the idea of an external drive that I can just backup to each week or so then disconnect.

Can u partition external hard drives just like internal ones? For example, if I had say 5GB on the internal for the OS, could I do the same with the external and then just backup that small amount pretty rarely? Then just have the rest of the drive backed up to the larger partition?

I'd schedule the backup to take place automatically during the night (pangit - any tips on how you do yours and other alternatives?), if I was to decide on doing a backup of the whole drive, with say a 3500+cpu and about 120Gb full, would it get done in the one night?

pangit · Post by **pangit** » Tue Mar 15, 2005 6:10 pm

Yeah, mine is set to backup each Friday night. I use Genie Backup Manager for selected files only which is pretty quick, but it can do full backups too. There are plenty of backup applications around and you can even use WinXP's built in one for basic use.

I think you should be able to back up 120GB overnight easily, even with a USB 2.0 external drive. And if you set it to incremental, it will be very fast after the first one. Just make sure you don't have only USB 1.1 capability.

I don't see any reason you should need separate partitions on your backup drive as each backup takes a single file, or you could use separate folders for each of your partitions. But of course you can partition external drives the same as internal ones if you want to.

Straker · Post by **Straker** » Tue Mar 15, 2005 11:14 pm

not that relevant to backups, just wanted to add that a swapfile on a separate *partition* is a bad idea unless you know what you're doing - worst case, you're reading a bunch of crap from the middle of the disk while paging at the same time, and the drive is spending more time doing full-stroke seeks than anything else.

m0002a · Post by **m0002a** » Wed Mar 16, 2005 12:01 am

Straker wrote:not that relevant to backups, just wanted to add that a swapfile on a separate *partition* is a bad idea unless you know what you're doing - worst case, you're reading a bunch of crap from the middle of the disk while paging at the same time, and the drive is spending more time doing full-stroke seeks than anything else.

That is correct. But if the other partition is on a different physical disk, then that would not be a problem. For best results, put each disk on its own disk controller (not a master/slave on one controller).

gooner_47 · Post by **gooner_47** » Wed Mar 16, 2005 5:58 am

Thanx 4 the feedback!