Ghosting a RAID drive

[lanceja]

Does anyone know of a program similar to Norton Ghost that will work with RAID? I bought the Norton Ghost 9.0 version but as far as I am concerned, I wasted my money on this piece of crap. It is a backup solution for a single computer. IT IS NOT a ghost software package.

I did find Acronis True Image 8.0, but am not sure if it will work. If anyone has any suggestions, would be helpful.

Thanks

 

[RICHINMINN]

It depends on what kind of backup you want to do. If you want to backup the data on your hard drive so that it can be reinstalled if your primary drive fails, Acronis True Image will do that, and do it very well. If you want to simply create an "image" of a hard drive and make duplicate copies of it on other hard drives, True Image is not what you're looking for.

Acronis True Image is a data backup software program, allowing you to create a full system backup followed by periodic incremental backups. A nice feature is that you can designate the destination backup storage area as a "secure zone", which is essentially a hidden partition or drive, which reduces the chance that either the operating system, an application program, or a person sitting at the keyboard can gain access to it and delete its contents or reformat it. This "secure zone" can be on a separate partition on the same hard drive, on a separate internal hard drive, or on an external hard drive.

The latest version of Norton Ghost has moved into the same arena: data backup and restoration. Earlier versions of Ghost did what I think you're wanting: creating copies of partitions/drives and duplicating them on other partitition/drives. I've got an old version of Ghost that does just this, but I don't recall what version it is. (It's several years old, like from the 2002-2003 timeframe.)

I'll check it out when I get home and post that information here then.

But then, I've never used it with a RAID setup either. (Though the existence of a RAID setup should be transparent to an application program that thinks it's simply writing to a hard drive. The RAID controller should intercept the data and stripe and/or mirror the data on the multiple drives.)

Rich (in Minn.)

 

[BaudKarma]

The problem is that most PC RAID requires you to install a Windows driver. If you boot up off a CD to restore a Ghost image, the driver isn't loaded, and you can't access the RAID to restore it.

I asked a similar question a month or so ago in

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1026212,

and someone posted an answer with a link to the Symantec knowledgebase article about the issue. Briefly, if you try to restore ghost with software RAID, you're screwed. With hardware RAID it might work, but don't ask them to help you.

If you ghost your RAID array, it's not totally worthless. You can reload your OS with the drivers, then use Ghost to restore your data files and pictures and all that stuff. Not quite as easy as it should be, but better then losing it all.



I try not to let my ignorance prevent me from offering a strong opinion.

 

[jurgen36]

No problems at all with Acronics True Image. It just puts everything back where it was before. You can also put theimage on another drive. All RAID drivers are copied back. I use it all the time from one raid to another. No problems at all.
Regards

Jurgen

 

[mukinusa]

If you have a software raid, you are limited to using a backup solution that you can run in your operating system.

If you have a hardware raid, the array is a single device and you could back it up to a single larger hard drive or tape device in any environment that you choose.

There are a number of backup solutions available, however the relativley inexpensive or free (including drive manufacturer untilities) drive imaging software doesn't recognize pci devices.

One piece of advice I offer people with hardware arrays is to become familiar with the DD command in *nix, you can boot from many floppy or cd based linux operating systems that will be able to dd the image even across a network. Helix is one of the disks that I use quite often to achieve this, as it has quite a small footprint and loads fairley quickly.

Martin Dare

http://www.darepc.com

Affordable data recovery
Martin@darepc.com