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Re: Backup--OT

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?


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!


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.