BackUp Programs

[HotPotato]

Ok, here is a really good question. I have a customer that has about 4G of stuff to back up. So I went out and bought a SATA Driver and an External enclosure and put it together. I got NTBACKUP to work and set up a schedule. I got to go over his house now and how his hand because he is unsure it is working.

So I researched Backup Programs, lookup for a verification log for backup. All these program including Ghost seem like crap. So any suggestions?

[YO_MA_MA]

So any suggestions?

though this may not be exactly what you are looking for it is an idea.
my setup is like this:
4 hard drives-
2 for RAID0 (striping) - holds Windows/Programs/Games and other files that are not irreplaceable able
2 for RAID1 (mirror) - Pictures/Documents/Music/CD Images/Installers and back ups of other peoples computers when i fix their problems >.>

it sounds like your going for a back up in case he/she clicks wrong and downloads a virus and you want a way to save his stuff if format is required.

another simple idea would be set a system restore to automatically start on boot. i use to know the command and you just copy that file to the startup folder but im trying to google it with no luck. it can be done, i had it on my desktop for quite some time.

just 2 suggestions, good luck

[HotPotato]

So I have an esata backup utilizing ntbackup. So you are saying that I could get a virus that could corrupt a ntbackup? I don't see it. It is setup for incremental backups daily. I agree, I have two options, one is system restore and the other is the backup. The machine I have this on has AVG anti virus, and spybot, which are run daily. Also he cleans up C drive and does his IE cleanup. I have yet, in all my years have a virus that I could not get rid of, and none of those viruses were really malicious.

When I came to this customer he was hacked with a rootkit and I have setup his systems to prevent such a thing in the future.

Getting a terabyte drive is just an overkill. I reviewed pc magazine, pc world, cnet and just did a review on the web and I just don't find a good reliable backup program that gives a log showing the end user information that the data has been back upped that day.

I agree with the RAID issue, but there are so many different types of RAID now adays. I want to know what is the different between a shadow and an image backup. Ghost offers an image backup, ntbackup is a shadow backup.

I appreciate all the input.

Hotpotato

[YO_MA_MA]

@zander
my understanding with raid1 was that the data is copied to both hard drives (which im pretty sure is correct). now if one hard drive crashes, you still have your data on the still working hard drive, but, would it still work as a regular single hard drive or do you have to get a replacement hard drive and re-raid1 them before you can access the data? my raid1 was more for if i had a hard drive failure, not really for viruses. and even if system restore takes up a lot of space (up to 12% of your hard drive) i still think it is worth it, i have saved many computers (including vista blue screening on startup) with a system recovery.

[SilverSquirrl]

@yomama - most of the time that is correct concerning the raid1. Working with raid systems at my job, 9 times out of 10, you can boot a failed raid 1 system using just the single drive outside of a raid setup. But there is still that 1 time that it won't work and I've run across that 1 time fairly often over the past year. (granted I'm dealing with a couple hundred servers using raid, and have 3-4 fail a month, so I see the good and bad of raid more)

[YO_MA_MA]

oh yeah... there is always the option of online backup ;)

at a max upload of ~65kb/s i would be a while..... my main computer has about 700gigs counting installed games, music, videos, pictures, cd images for LANs(200gigs lol), OS and whatever im working on.

though if you back up online and one of THEIR computers fails that all your info is sitting on, dont you have the same exact problem? anyway, as zander said, its everyones own opinion.

and for the 9/10 chance... if this was school that would be an 'A', and i like 'A's ^.^

[HotPotato]

I have never used RAID, but I do understand that there are a number of level, yet I don't understand all of them. But here they are anyways.

RAID (rād) Short for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks, a category of disk drives that employ two or more drives in combination for fault tolerance and performance. RAID disk drives are used frequently on servers but aren't generally necessary for personal computers. RAID allows you to store the same data redundantly (in multiple paces) in a balanced ay to improve overall performance.

There are number of different RAID levels:
# Level 0 -- Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost.
# Level 1 -- Mirroring and Duplexing: Provides disk mirroring. Level 1 provides twice the read transaction rate of single disks and the same write transaction rate as single disks.
# Level 2 -- Error-Correcting Coding: Not a typical implementation and rarely used, Level 2 stripes data at the bit level rather than the block level.
# Level 3 -- Bit-Interleaved Parity: Provides byte-level striping with a dedicated parity disk. Level 3, which cannot service simultaneous multiple requests, also is rarely used.
# Level 4 -- Dedicated Parity Drive: A commonly used implementation of RAID, Level 4 provides block-level striping (like Level 0) with a parity disk. If a data disk fails, the parity data is used to create a replacement disk. A disadvantage to Level 4 is that the parity disk can create write bottlenecks.
# Level 5 -- Block Interleaved Distributed Parity: Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance. Level 5 is one of the most popular implementations of RAID.
# Level 6 -- Independent Data Disks with Double Parity: Provides block-level striping with parity data distributed across all disks.
# Level 0+1 -- A Mirror of Stripes: Not one of the original RAID levels, two RAID 0 stripes are created, and a RAID 1 mirror is created over them. Used for both replicating and sharing data among disks.
# Level 10 -- A Stripe of Mirrors: Not one of the original RAID levels, multiple RAID 1 mirrors are created, and a RAID 0 stripe is created over these.
# Level 7: A trademark of Storage Computer Corporation that adds caching to Levels 3 or 4.
# RAID S: (also called Parity RAID) EMC Corporation's proprietary striped parity RAID system used in its Symmetrix storage systems.

[YO_MA_MA]

There are number of different RAID levels:

I'd consider these to be the common ones, both i have in my main computer:
raid 0 ~ data is split between 2 hard drives, much faster, but if one dies, your screwed.
raid 1 ~ data is copied on 2 hard drives, reads faster, writes regular speed, if one dies you can usually recover your data from the working hard drive.

Ones i hear are common but i havent done:
raid 5 ~ uses 4 hard drives and is basically a safer raid 0, 1 hard drive can fail and you should be ok
raid 0+1 ~ 4 hard drives, basically makes 2 raid0 which has the performance boost, but they are copied over 2 hard drives (raid1 style) for the safety factor.

if i fail at explaining, check wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID), they do a pretty good job verbally and visually.

[HotPotato]

I read over your reply several times and looked up your links. I guess my future with be going to windows server 2003 and play around with enterprise systems. I really appreciated your reply.