New Vista User with questions

I've looked through this forum and read the PDF but I'm still a little confused. I just bought ATI 10. Here is what I want to accomplish.

I'm running Vista Home
I have a 300gb HD
I have a secondary 320gb hard drive for backups


I want to be able to recover in case of a HD failure. I would like to do a scheduled backup once a week to the 320gb hard drive. In a perfect world, if the 300gb HD fails I would like to make the 320gb HD become the main drive.

Does this make sene? What do I use? Clone?

 

If you just want to be able to swap the drives then a clone is what you need. However, a clone is an exact copy of the original drive and does not lend itself to having other information stored on it. If you had other files backed up on it an then did another clone to update it, the other files would be overwritten.

If you don't have much information on the 300GB drive you could perhaps partition the 320GB drive and create images on the second partition. If you have a failure of the main drive you could install the 320GB drive and restore an image to the first partition. Like I said, it depends on how much space is required for this to work.

Copying images to DVDs is another option but if you have lots of data it would be very painful to restore.

IMO, your best bet is to make image backups to the 320GB drive and have another drive available to restore to should the main drive fail. To be certain your backup/restore works reliably, you should be doing a test restore to another drive anyway and having another drive would address this as well.

 

So from what you said does this make sense?

The 300gb doesn't have partions and only has about 100gb of data. I don't think this will grow much over time.

From what you said, it sounds like I should take the 320gb(nothing on it) and partion it into 2 drives. I would then take one of those partions and create a clone. could then use the other partition for other use.

If the first drive than fails, I could just take the 320gb drive and use that cloned partion to boot from?

 

Not exactly. A clone, at least for TI, means you make an identical copy of the entire drive on a second entire drive. Cloning does not work on individual partitions and is really intended for replacing an old drive with a new drive, not as a backup mechanism.

You would make images of the first drive on the second partition of the second drive. When the main drive fails, you would install the second drive in the machine, bootup with the TI rescue CD and restore the latest image from the second partition to the first partition.

Given that you have around a 100GB of data, if you split the drive into 2 160GB partitions, you could probably only get 2 images (assuming they compress well, and if lots of the data is jpgs, zips, mpegs, rars, it won't) stored on the second partition which isn't too much better than just a clone other than updating it won't overwrite everything on the drive (you would delete the oldest image to make room for the new one).

I think if it were my system, I would consider just using the entire external drive for backups and worry about a new drive when the time came unless your machine is critical for some business application. In that case, you should be prepared to throw some money at the problem and buy another drive.

This doesn't get you out of the problem of not doing a restore to make sure you can when it is necessary. However, you can make an image on the external and then boot up the TI rescue CD. Make sure you can validate the image using the rescue CD and go through the restore wizard all the way to the "Proceed" screen. If you can do this successfully there is a good probability it will work but and it is indeed a "but" you can't be 100% certain.

 

Thanks a ton, you've been a lot of help.

So you're saying to not create a partition on the backup HD but then what type of backup process should I use on a weekly basis?

 

You need to create at least one partition of course.

I would just make images and you can make folders if you wish since images are just big files. If you backed up the entire drive by making a Full image you would probably fit 3 or 4 images on the external.

Another option is to make a Full each week and then make incrementals each day if you want to backup each day. Naturally, you can adjust the timing to suit your purpose such as a Full every two weeks and an incremental every second day. I would advise against making a Full and then a long string of say 30 incrementals; the reason being that if an incremental is bad then all the later ones are useless.

I only use TI to back up my OS/Apps partition. My data files are not in the same partition and I use a different method to back them up. Since the OS/Apps area isn't that critical to me I only do an image when I think I should (usually if I'm going to install or test some new stuff) and I always do Full images.

 

Escuse me for being a novice. Wouldn't this work for testing a recovery scenario:

System is initially on DriVe C.

Image Drive C on to sufficiently large partition of different Drive D

Restore Image on to another Partition of the same Drive D (call it Drive E)

Reset BIOS to Boot from Drive E with higher priority than original Drive C and see if you can run from Drive E for a while.

If it works, that is as close to testing it "for real" as you can get without actually overwriting original Drive C. You could then delete the restored image on E and use it for normal storage.

Workee ?