New PC back-up system

[carpediem79]

Ok....I need some help on figuring out the best way to do this...

My goal is to make my PC have a good back-up system. I have 2 80GB SATA dirves right now that are RAID mirrored. I plan on getting 2 more drives.

I plan on having 2 sets of mirrored drives.
My goal is to have the OS and applications on one drive set and files and important data on the other.

I just ran into a problem with this PC though where the PC got a virus and I had to reinstall everything. It was annoying. The drives saved the data, which was good. However I would like one drive to clone the other, but is it possible to have it so it is hotswappable so it is not connected to the application drive should something happen?

Basically, a way to set it up the the main OS drive gets cloned but the drive cloned to is able to be used as a back-up should something happen?

I hope this makes sense...

 

[BadFrog]

I would recommend doing a google on RAID arrays. There are various ways you can setup RAID arrays. Based on what your asking a striping type array comes to mind but my knowledge in that area is limited. You may consider posting this in the server forum.

"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy"
Albert Einstein

 

[MonkeyX]

one small problem with mirrored RAIDS... They work great in the event of hardware failure. However, anything like a virus or file deletion etc. will also be mirrored across the drives.

One option is a good backup on an external media (eg dvd cds) or just a ghost image on a different drive. I suppose you could set up the RAID to mirror your install and any major chages/updates and then break the RAID untill you need to update the image. But I could see that becoming way more trouble than it is worth.

 

[kmcferrin]

It sounds like you're on the right track with having your drives mirrored. That's one of the easiest ways to protect against a drive failure. However, as MonkeyX pointed out, it doesn't protect against data corruption/viruses. Only a regular backup will do that.

Your backup can go to some form of external media, USB hard disk, or even internal hard disks. Just make sure that you save them as image files or backup sets (using whatever backup software) so that they don't get written to accidentally.

 

[carpediem79]

I think I may go with Acronis' True Image. Just backup all the data from one disk to the other. Nice and simple!