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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.


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.