Backup query (wrong forum - I know)

[Novexx]

I have posted in the "General back-up" forum, but there dosn't seem to be much happening over there, so I thought I would give it a try in my usuall place (here).

I have a 3 PC Win200Pro PnP network, which although small (15Gb total) contains mostly vital data.

At the moment I am doing a daily critical file backup on a weekly rotation (nothing archived, I can only get as far back as one week). I want to move onto something a bit more robust, FAST and simple.

I would really like something that will allow me to recover from serious failure in the minimum of time. I would like to go down the HDD backup option, and copy/mirror the entire system (OS, App & data)to disk for removal each evening, swaping with a remote disk daily? With the hope that if I have a serious meltdown, I can get up and running straight away from the backup disk?

Unfortunatley I cant afford an endless amount of HDDs, so I figure that this will be a problem for anything past the number of daily disks that I have.

If I upped the number of HDD's from two swapping daily to one for each day of the week, and used tape for the weekly / monthly backups - would this work?

On the subject of disk mirroring, and straight swap to the mirror on hardware failure, I understand how this works on a single PC, but can it be applied to my 3 PCs with one backup disk, still giving me the ability to "plug & go" if I have to? I assume that having the backup HDD partitioned for each PCs data would allow this?

On the hardware front I have been looking at;
Accordance ARAID,
Iomega REV,
High-Rely.

I had considered Casper XP as software, but understand that it will only work on the one PC scenario?

Excuse me if I am talking from my back passage here, but I am pretty confused with the amount of backup devices & software that is out there - I know this;

I want something simple & fast,
I want to be up in a short space of time following problems,
(I dont want to have to go through loading OS/Apps&data),
I would prefer HDD to Tape if poss.

.

 

[tekuser999]

I'm using MirrorFolder, which is a real time backup system.
What I've done to my system is first ghost an image of my existing system to another harddisk and then set mirroring to my critical data folders.

Any changes to the data will be automatically backup to the mirror disk. (will need to change the volume id of the backup disk as the program will not write to another disk with same volume id, got a freeware (volumeid.exe) to do this). In case of meltdown, I just swap the back up disk as boot disk and the system is up in no time.

Take a look at this link:

http://www.techsoftpl.com/backup/

 

[Novexx]

Thanks for that, MirrorFolder would give me a backup faster than the normal method will, and I would have the ability of being up & running in a short time after disaster, but;

It looks as if I would need a local disk per PC ("at present MirrorFolder does not support mirroring entire system drive on a remote network drive.")?

What do you do for historical data backup?


Thanks again.

 

[northmans]

Well, I can recommend you to use this data backup storage software: create an image of your "C" HDD and keep one copy on "D" another on bootable CD (it takes not much space due to compression), as I always do. You may recover image without load Windows. I think it's the best and fast way to keep and protect data. It takes me about 10 min. to recover all HDD partitions, it works very fast due to bare-metal restoration technology. Also you may do back up manually or automatically, as you wish.
I do incremental backup every day using built-in task sheduler, and once a month I remake full backup. Also, if you have the similar PC you can use one back up disk for all, so you'll get 3 equals HDDs with all Os, apps and data.
I use home edition, as I have only one PC, but it has enterprise server version. It allows perform a full system restore, or just restore of data bases, files, and folders in minutes and save on tape.