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Re: Backup--OT



Well, that would be a dealbreaker on that particular product for me. I
would never trust any archival system that did not verify writes. Lost too
many files over the years! Little things - - but things I wanted. Just
because a drive boots does not mean -- far from it -- that every byte has
been correctly copied.



Really? I haven't seen incorrect copying for decades.

He recommends RAID. I was wondering if that wouldn't be a better solution
than the disk duplicator. But the RAID enclosure would have to connect by
some means to the computer, and wouldn't that slow things down?


--Harry



For anyone who wants further fuel for storage paranoia, Robin Harris's
articles on NTFS corruption and SSD corruption are good starting points:


http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/how-ssds-can-hose-your-data/1423

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/how-microsoft-puts-your-data-at-risk/169

(further searches will reveal how Apple missed the boat on supporting a
reliable file system; also his stuff on MDISC which apparently finally has
a '1000-year' blu-ray - - topics discussed on this list last year)


At 20/04/2014 19:24, you wrote:


That's interesting - - I didn't think you'd be easy to convince. And as
I say, you've gotten me to doubt. I am assuming that there is some kind
of verify mechanism?



Just that I put the backup drive in the machine and it boots.



Regarding ShadowProtect, I just now had a need accidentally downloaded
something from Linkbury which is one of the most annoying things ever. I
had backed up an hour ago so I thought it would be a cinch to restore
from ShadowProtect. But, on my new Dell system with the 8 partitions and
heaven only knows what sort of BIOS, I simply cannot get the recovery
environment to work. It will boot, via a USB external CD, but then it
hangs. There are many ways around this: I could just do it all on
another system, but I am disturbed that I cannot do it on the host
system. This is the first time I have had a problem with ShadowProtect.
Harry, you brought it upon me!



The Shadow knows!




At 18/04/2014 17:53, you wrote:


Bill,

You've convinced me not to use any software solution. The best I can
think of in using the disk duplicator is to get or fabricate some kind
of cable that would allow me to keep the SSD *outside* of the computer.
I've searched for these, but I don't think they exist. The idea would
be to plug one end of the cable inside the laptop where the SSD
connects and the other end of the cable to the SSD. Its purpose would
only be to avoid having to unscrew the little door on the Thinkpad
inside of which the SSD normally lives. Ideally the cable extender
would be a Y-shaped one, so that the SSD would always be plugged into
both the computer and the drive duplicator.


As to the one I use, it's available for $51 from newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?gclid=CJPqpNy_6r0CFQ2hOgoda2oAJw&Item=N82E16817422030&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleAdwords&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-_-pla-_-Hard+Drive+Enclosures-_-N82E16817422030&ef_id=U0QBfgAABVdzqSDN:20140418165301:s

Regards,
Harry



Hi Harry,

1. The files that ShadowProtect creates are not the image itself. (You
will often choose to use some degree of compression.) They are the
data SP uses to create the image on the target media. I don't know how
to explain it any better than that - - it is confusing. I am not
confident that I am using the vocabulary correctly.


2. So: let's say you have a hard drive that has failed, and you need
to restore your system to a new hard drive from the SP backup you made
an hour before the crash.


You need the SP program to take your backup data and write the image
onto the new hard drive. I have done this in two ways.


a. by booting the SP disk on my target computer's CD (on a new system
you could just as well boot with a USB stick), and restoring to new
hard drive from an external with the SP data


or

b. by using a different computer that has SP installed. On this
computer, I will have two external drives. Drive 1 is the SP backup;
Drive 2 is the blank you want to image. In this case, I tell the SP
program to restore Drive 2 from Drive 1. (Physically speaking, I do
not place Drive 2, the new hard drive, into an actual enclosure;
rather, I use Newertech's Universal Drive Adapter which connects,
without any enclosure or fuss, any drive to a USB 2/3 port.)


You've forced me to think about this deeply unpleasant subject again,
and I offer these observations:


1. SP seems to work. By contrast, I have not been happy with more or
less recent versions of Ghost and Acronis. I was particularly upset
when Ghost lost the ability to live clone one hard drive to another -
- perhaps that has been fixed? Apart from that, both Ghost and Acronis
have always been buggy for me.


2. There definitely are gotchas in SP. One of its characteristics is
that there are some partitions that will only backup on a full backup.
They will not work on an incremental backup job. Therefore, if you
don't want to see a backup failed message, you have to remove those
partitions from the incremental backup job. I don't like this.


3. More and more, I can see the point in using a hardware-only
solution such as you have, and would be grateful if you pointed me to
the website for the product. I do strenuously object to the
requirement that you have to remove the source drive from the computer
each time you want to do a backup, but if this is the price one has to
pay for total duplication security, I might be willing to do it on an
infrequent basis.


4. In addition to SP, I use www.memopal.com for continuous-to-cloud
backup of data files. I have found this works very well so far. One
thing I like about this system is that it backs up as soon as the file
is saved to host disk, and saves multiple versions. This feature has
saved my butt on many occasions. However, it would be tiresome to have
to do a full restore of data files from this service.


5. Participating in this thread and facing my current problems with SP
and my 7-partition 'plain vanilla' new system, I realize that, in
order to avoid error messages, I need to schedule two separate backups.


a. A non-incremental weekly backup of the entire hard drive, including
all the invisible partitions.


b. An incremental hourly backup of the only partition (i.e. 'c') which
actually has any changed data.


I have not done this yet, so, with my current system schedule, SP will
report success for my weekly, full backups, but will report failure
for the incremental backups. It is important to the note that the
incremental backups have not failed. If I go into the 'details' tab, I
will discover that the incremental backup of my 'c volume' - - which
is the only volume on which any data has change - - has been
successful. The parts of the job that reportedly 'fail' are some of
the hidden partitions; and the error message always is the same:
incrementals not supported on this volume.


I hope this has been helpful. Showing is better than telling, so I
suggest downloading a trial copy from the storagecraft website.


Again, this only follows my own experience. I started using SP about
five or six years ago, on v. 3, after reading Ed Mendelson's review in
PC Mag. Ed is not just any magazine reviewer. This polymath is also
Trilling Professor at Columbia and Auden's executor and, of course, a
notorious WP/DOS maven. I believe he is the most knowledgeable and
incorruptible of all the computer magazine writers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Mendelson .


At 18/04/2014 03:22, you wrote:


Bill,

This sounds great. But I'm confused about one thing. If the image
file is bootable, what's doing with the CD? You say, "in case of
disaster." Meaning what? That your regular hard drive won't boot? I
don't fully trust booting from a CD (have had problems: the Lenovo
Thinkpad I have doesn't have an internal CD drive, so have to use an
external USB CD drive and change the boot order, but it doesn't
always work--something about the unreliability of non-powered USB CD
drives, I think.


So why can't you boot from the bootable image? And how specifically
would you go from invoking SP on another computer to getting a drive
to insert in the now defunct computer?


Thanks so much,
Harry


Harry, I am totally with you in the idea that the only Windows
backup worth having is a complete bootable one. However, I do it
differently: automated and in software. I use ShadowProtect. This
creates a bootable image file (I split it into 640MB segments) that
is incrementable and automatable (I do a full backup every week; an
incremental every 3 hours).


So how do you get a bootable drive out of this? In case of disaster,
you boot up with a ShadowProtect CD (or simply invoke ShadowProtect
on another computer) and restore your image to your target hard drive.


The result will be a perfect duplicate.

I have done this several times with complete success. ShadowProtect
is the only such system that has ever worked for me. (Acronis is not
a patch on it.) I have complete confidence in it.


Are there any gotchas? I would say that you have to watch the
numerous hidden partitions (more and more!) that modern computers
are beginning toi have. (For example there are seven partitions on
my plain vanilla Dell XPS 15 late 2013. Why so many? Heaven knows.)
Once or twice, I have lost one of these partitions, but it has not
affected me in any visible way.


SSDs are great but they can benefit from maintenance and they do in
the end fail.


Why not use both? Continue to use the hardware solution but only
once every couple of months? Meanwhile use the software solution
regularly. You will then have the convenience of up-to-the-minute
backups (as long as the backup drive is connected of course).


These images are complete total, total, total duplicates of your
hard drive state. There is no need to worry about losing any value whatever.


NB: This is just one user's experience over the past few years.


At 17/04/2014 22:11, you wrote:

I have a technical question that maybe one or more of you would be
so kind as to help with.


I've been bitten by disaster too many times not to be very
concerned with backup. I have now what is the ideal solution,
except for one flaw: I take the SSD drive out of my Lenovo Thinkpad
(fairly easy to do, but requires unscrewing one screw), and put it
with the backup drive into a toaster-like drive-duplicator from
Aluratek that duplicates the SSD, sector by sector, onto the backup
drive. The result is a completely substitutable, bootable dupe of
my SSD (which I then replace in my Thinkpad).


The only problem is that I can't do this, of course, as a scheduled
task.


I am doing physical drive duplication because via software, you
can't produce a bootable drive. But is making a clone image good
enough? I have tried Acronis, EaseUS, and Carbonite for making
"images," but they aren't bootable. As I understand it (through a
glass, darkly), you boot your system some other way, then "restore"
the image. It's all smoke and mirrors to me. I don't trust "booting
some other way," even though the Thinkpad has a system recovery
partition on the main drive (i.e., my SSD). So, am I being a
scaredy-cat? Should I rely on images and just "get over it" re my
bafflement at what the restore process is? Would the end result be
not just the return of my data files but of all my OS settings,
including the registry?


A final thought: is the image, like a virtual machine, just one
file that you only need a running computer to activate?


Thanks for the hand-holding.