elzool Posted February 9, 2004 Report Share Posted February 9, 2004 Hi, I have two computers networked together. One has XP Home and two HDs and I'd like a full image of its primary Local Disk © put onto the secondary drive in this computer. My other computer is running Win 98 and has two drives as well. I'd like to be able to copy all the data on its secondary drive to the first computers secondary drive. I'd like this to be automated and only get the files that have been added and/or changed. My goal is be able to rely on the secondary drive in the XP machine should anything happen to either computer. If the primary drive dies in the XP machine, I'd like to restore the image of it from the secondary drive to a new drive. If the secondary drive in the Win 98 machine fails, I'd like to be able to restore the files onto a new drive. Will Retrospect Professional be able to accomplish this for me? Thank you, Richard Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted February 9, 2004 Report Share Posted February 9, 2004 I do this (two drives, image primary drive to secondary) on all my PCs. And I also cross-backup (below) since I have multiple PCs and drives on a 100Mbps LAN. There's some prep work if you want to make the recovery process as easy as possible. 1) Preinstall an OS on the secondary drive e.g. disconn the primary drive to avoid mistakes, boot from a CD/floppy and install an OS (W2K is good) on the secondary, make sure you can boot from it. You can preinstall a copy of Retrospect, an imaging program (Symantec Ghost, Drive Image), Norton SystemWorks (disk repair and anti-virus repair) for later use. 2) Reconn your primary drive and boot from it. You should see both drives. 3) Run a disk imaging program (this *isn't* Retrospect) to image the main drive to a *file* on the secondary drive--Symantec Ghost (my choice) or PowerQuest Drive Image are two that work well. This make a complete restorable image of your entire main drive for later use. Since the image is a file it doesn't take up the whole drive and you can use the rest of the space for other backups. 4) With Retrospect installed on the main drive, you can run (nightly, weekly, etc.) backups using Retrospect from the main drive to the secondary drive. You can also run backups to the secondary drive on your *other* machine (cross-backup) if you have them networked (10 or 100Mbps). Having two backups, with staggered recycles and different goals (e.g. short vs. long-term backup--how often you backup vs. how often you recycle) can greatly increase your backup reliability. I did once have the primary drive on a PC die in the middle of a Retrospect backup and I lost both the primary *and* the backup on the secondary drive as Retrospect or the OS mangled the backup. A second full backup, only one day older, on another networked drive bailed me out. 5) A recovery process becomes a) boot from the secondary drive (into a *real* Windows OS, not some DOS environment) Note: can run SystemWorks (etc.) from sec. drive to try to fix problems on your main drive before giving up run your imaging program to restore your backup image onto the main drive (reformatted, replaced) c) run Retrospect to restore the desired backup (all files). I've had occasions where the *most recent* backp was not a good choice (e.g. if something happened to your system three days ago, you may want use a backup from four days ago for the full backup, then manually restore a handful of more recent data files). d) boot from the restored boot drive Retrospect also has a Disaster Recovery process. This involves making a boot CD (ideally while your main drive is working, although there is some ability to create it from the backup), preinstalling a partial OS on your reformatted main drive and running Retrospect to restore from you backups. I've read of enough problems (and had some myself trying to work around problems with drivers, RAID, network issue, etc.) that I took it out of their hands by spending the time pre-building a backup boot disk. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brim4636 Posted February 16, 2004 Report Share Posted February 16, 2004 Very good and concise explanation of a backup/restore strategy! Two questions relating to the installation of an OS on the secondary drives. 1) Do you create a separate boot partition on those drives or leave them as one big partition? 2) Do you bother to update the security patches for the secondary disk OS? I'm thinking here of MS and their "a patch a day keeps the hackers at bay" system? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brim4636 Posted February 16, 2004 Report Share Posted February 16, 2004 Here's an after thought question to follow up my earlier post. Am I correct in believing that in your system of primary/secondary drives both drives should be formatted with the same file system; both FAT32 or both NTFS, for example, but *not* a mixture of the two? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted February 17, 2004 Report Share Posted February 17, 2004 > 1) Do you create a separate boot partition on those drives or leave them as one big partition? One big partition on any drive, NTFS everywhere since I've been using W2K and//or XP exclusively for a while. I have PartionMagic but don't use it for much. NTFS is very good for large drives. The imaging programs only back up valid (non-blank) data, so the physical size of the primary disk doesn't matter, only the amount of data (OS, apps, data, etc.). 2) Do you bother to update the security patches for the secondary disk OS? No. Since it's not running, it won't be the source of anything getting into the system. And I don't want to "abuse" that OS so that it's a pretty sure bet to work when I need it. It's only running during a restore, so you can even disconnect the PC from the Internet if you're really concerned (not a real issue behind a NAT router). The saved image will match/work with the program version & OS saved on that drive so that should work. The more interesting situation is if Retrospect comes out with new versions (v6, v7, v8...) and you have an older version (e.g. v5) on the second drive. You may have to update Retro on the second drive before doing that part of the restore. 3) Am I correct in believing that in your system of primary/secondary drives both drives should be formatted with the same file system; both FAT32 or both NTFS, for example, but *not* a mixture of the two? Doesn't matter. The secondary drive is only used to store the image and run the imaging program and Retro during the restore. I prefer NTFS for all since it has some "self-healing" features and eliminates most practical file-size issues, but many backup programs (Ghost, Retro) have provisions for segmenting backups so even FATx *can* be used. And you want to run an OS on the secondary drive that will handle the formatting of the secondary & primary, whatever they are (NTFS, FATx, etc. -- the reason why I mentioned that W2K, also with no Activation issues, was good). Of course you may have to do some more work for new or different OSes (e.g. ext2, the next MS formatting scheme, etc.). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brim4636 Posted February 17, 2004 Report Share Posted February 17, 2004 Quote: GoAWest said: 3) Am I correct in believing that in your system of primary/secondary drives both drives should be formatted with the same file system; both FAT32 or both NTFS, for example, but *not* a mixture of the two? Doesn't matter. The secondary drive is only used to store the image and run the imaging program and Retro during the restore. I prefer NTFS for all since it has some "self-healing" features and eliminates most practical file-size issues, but many backup programs (Ghost, Retro) have provisions for segmenting backups so even FATx *can* be used. And you want to run an OS on the secondary drive that will handle the formatting of the secondary & primary, whatever they are (NTFS, FATx, etc. -- the reason why I mentioned that W2K, also with no Activation issues, was good). Of course you may have to do some more work for new or different OSes (e.g. ext2, the next MS formatting scheme, etc.). I was thinking about the issue of doing normal backups (not images) from primary to secondary drive. If, for example, the primary is NTFS and the secondary (either on the same machine or a networked drive) is FAT32 I thought there was a problem of losing the file security permissions embedded in a NTFS system. Perhaps I'm confused on this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted February 17, 2004 Report Share Posted February 17, 2004 > If, for example, the primary is NTFS and the secondary (either on the same machine or a networked drive) is FAT32 I thought there was a problem of losing the file security permissions embedded in a NTFS system. Perhaps I'm confused on this. If you were doing a "Duplicate" (Windows format of the data, as individual files), this could be an issue. But when using Retrospect's "Backup" mode, you're not saving the individual files & permissions but rather saving everything to a single big file for a File backup (or many files for a Disk backup). So the permission info is embedded *inside* the backup file and it doesn't make any difference whether the dest. drive is FAT, NTFS, EXT2 (Linux), etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brim4636 Posted February 17, 2004 Report Share Posted February 17, 2004 Thanks for all your help GoAWest! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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