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Ask HN: How to do disk backup?

1 points by NY_USA_Hacker ↗ HN
What are the better options for doing disk backup of a large PC up to a small Web server farm?

Some of the issues: Media, software, techniques, restoring, online, relational database, bootable drive partitions, full, incremental, disk to disk (all internal, on same computer or a different one), disk to removable media, speed.

3 comments

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iamdave
Creating a disk image using something like Norton Ghost might be a viable option that offers a [somewhat] manageable degree of portability.
NY_USA_Hacker
You mean for a bootable partition? If so, then how to restore it? Can the partition be backed up while the OS on it is booted?

Backup to where? To a file on another disk in the same computer, on another computer, to removable media?

I'm running Windows XP SP3 and finally figured out how to use its NTBACKUP to get a copy of a bootable partition and how to restore it. Lesson: Likely need to practice and then take own, clear notes on the details. I wrote some scripts.

The removable media I've been using is just DVDs, and they top out at about 4 GB per DVD. For 20 GB, 200 GB, 1 TB, etc, 4 GB DVDs are a bummer.

I haven't tried double sided DVDs or BluRay. There is the old 'linear tape open' LTO option with about 1 TB per tape, but the drives, and likely the tapes, are expensive, and I know nothing ahout the software available.

Another option is to get a maybe 2 TB external hard disk connected via USB, but, again, I know nothing about the available software, if can do a 'synchronization', etc.

iamdave
Not entirely. Ideally, a disk image would be used to redeploy another computer in the case of an critical OS failure. You would restore it in the case of Norton Ghost by inserting the disk, Ghost will then activate from that disk and allow you to restore that image.

Now if you create the image, storing it on a high capacity network drive would be a good option since it allows you to retrieve multiple images from one location to perform a remote restoration.

The benefits of this method allow you to back up multiple drive images, and deploy functioning computers much quicker than reformatting a hard drive, downloading and installing each hardware driver.

At one company I worked for, we serviced 10 different desktop models. In addition to having a lot of DVDs, we also had each image stored on the network. So if Windows shit the bed, we'd say a short prayer that they were saving to their home folder on the DC like they're supposed to and send a signal to perform a network boot and restore the latest image for their model computer.