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Re: Backup--OT

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.