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Hard drive back up. Backing up the back up

2K views 12 replies 8 participants last post by  booms1 
#1 ·
Well i have 2 external usb hard drives one 500GB and one 2TB, when i save to one drive i have to remember to save to the other drive.
What i want to do is get one box with 2 drives in it that is a ghost of the other drive.
So i can back up my back up. Say every time i save something to one drive its saved on the other drive automatically.
Is it software that will ghost one hard drive to the other?

Could i do it with this dock from the bay and two 3.5 2TB Hard drives?


http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Twin-IDE-...ng_Stations_Port_Replicat&hash=item256ec2cbfc


I have lost a laptop h/d years ago and lost about 5 years worth of photos that was not backed up, so i am back up mad now.
and i have just had to format my laptop because i thought the H/D was on its way out, so back up is at the top of my mind at the moment.
It turned out the be a lint build up in side the fan exhaust that i only found when i was going to repaste the GPU chip because of over heat shut down(blue screen)H/D fail then freezing screen(over heat GPU)



Well any help you can give about backing up my back up great.
 
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#2 ·
I set up my desktop with two raid discs, It's set-up to duplicate the data identical on both discs, so if one disc goes down i'm safe. Obviously if you get a power spike etc i could potentially loose both discs at the same time. The set-up I have is not meant to replace regular backups. Whether RAID systems can be configured to back up your laptop I don't know!
 
#3 ·
Check out http://www.nas4free.org/

This is free software for setting up your own Network Attached Storage. I used an old PC (Spec doesn't need to be great) with a couple of 1TB disks setup as RAID 1 Mirror, used a 4GB memory stick to install the software and configured the PC to boot from this (BIOS Setting). NAS4Free supports loads of different sharing methods, I setup CIFS so I can connect to the drives from Windows and also UPnP so I can stream music, photos and audi to my PS3, IPhone and IPad.
 
#4 ·
Cheers Guys
I have tried a NAS drive, but it would not work with my set up.
What i have is
A small home network.

A laptop in the office with the two usb drives connected to it. The modem and router in the same room connected to the laptop (LAN). I dont even use this laptop, its just there so i can access the two drives, its all ways on. Thats why i tried a NAS drive so i could remove the upstairs laptop.

A laptop down stairs using the two h/d up stairs over wifi on my network.
I have an Xbox with XBMC down stairs connected to the router (LAN) streaming the two hard drives on my network as well. XBMC cannot work on a NAS drive. Or it did not with what i got. A NAS adapter that connected a usb drive to the router and made it a NAS drive.
XBMC needs to connect to a network, so i could not get it to work on a NAS drive.

Most of the time i am happy with it all just working, but then i get a bee in my bonnet and want to steam line it and look to upgrade/make it better.


The main thing i would like to do is two drives that back each other up.
If i could out the all ways on office laptop even better. How about a server, could that do what i want?



Just thought i would put you in the picture so we are singing from the same page.

Thanks for all your help.
 
#5 · (Edited)
The main problem with your setup is you are accessing the drives via USB which is pretty slow in comparison to a SATA connected drive.

My NAS4Free server is plugged into a cheap switch and I've configured it to have a static IP addess. You configure the server through a Web Gui, its pretty straight forward - you can create shares on the NAS4FRee box and then map the share to a drive letter on your PC.

For streaming it uses something called FUPPES and this will stream media to an Xbox 360, I've seen this in the documentation but never tested out. As well as streaming to my PS3, Iphone I've also successfully streamed films to a PC running XP and XBMC, so it should certainly be possible.

If you are into a bit of tinkering this might be for you.
 
#7 ·
Cheers Phoenixsp1
I dont have any problems with accessing the usb drive and streaming to my old xbox (XBMC).

Still time to move it along i think.
I will have a good google to read up on the NAS4Free.
I have loads of old pc's here with loads of old drive's that i could make use of. Maybe i should build a pc for the office with all the old bits and freenas it up.
I do like a little tinkering, but sometimes i am happy if its all just working.
There is always something to do computer based in this house. Can you fix this, can you fix that.
 
#8 ·
Most NAS boxes will support streaming, but maybe not transcoding which is what you might be doing to the xbox. From memory the laptop might be playing and converting the video signal to one the xbox understands?

if streaming then definitely get a NAS box as it will make your life easier. I have a synology NAS box, but dont think of that as your backup think of it as a datastore, then back it up with other drives.

If you had a NAS box then all the data could be there, some devices like the synology can backup the NAS to a USB drive you plug into them, so its time to make a backup? plug the hdd in press a button wait for it to back up then unplug it and put it somewhere safe (another building is safe the same building its not!)

Alternatively plug in a hdd to a pc on the lan and use something like syncback to copy from the NAS to the USB drive then put it somewhere safe. If you have another backup thats best. (i use virginmedias unlimited online backup as i have their xxlfibre broadband and get it free)

I have a NAS box, a PC with enough storage and online backup.

  • NAS box sits on LAN chugging away
  • To backup i use the pc and run syncback to copy from NAS to PC
  • The PC then has the virgin media backup service running which backs its storage up tp the cloud.

The PC is in the shed not the house (connected via gigabit lan :) ) so if the NAS gets stolen or goes up in smoke i have everything on the other PC, if they both go pop at the same time i at least have my photos (50+gb) in the cloud (i dont back up everything to the cloud just photos and really important stuff).

If you are transcoding it might be a pita to get rid of the pc that serves the data.

Someone once told me "if you dont have your data in 3 places, you might as well not bother with a "backup" " its true.

JOhn R
 
#9 · (Edited)
Someone once told me "if you dont have your data in 3 places, you might as well not bother with a "backup" " its true.
You made an important point about different physical places also being a consideration. I back up our PCs regularly to our NAS box (cheapo unit from Arianet, can't recommend it highly enough) but every few months I copy all of the really critical stuff like holiday photos and family history research to several DVDs and store them in my desk at work. That way if the house burns down I still have my most important data. The only way I can lose both sets of data are if Sheffield gets nuked and in that scenario I'll have more to worry about. :D
 
#10 ·
What I do on our network at work is to have a nightly daily backup of all our servers to a dedicated backup server which has a RAID array of 2TB, the data gets backed up from the servers disk to the backup server disk, then onto 800GB tapes which get changed every day, I also run an incremental backup every day at lunch time which backs up any data that may have changed since the last nightly backup, by having disk to disk then tape means I can restore recent data from disk, and any other data older from tape, the tapes run in a rotation of 20 days, and at the end of each month a tape is archived away and not used again, I also do a full Disaster Backup of each individual server so if the worst happens I have a chance to get things running again, on the servers I run RAID 1 on the boot drives, and RAID 5 on the Data Drives, and the servers support hot drive changing, which I have had to do which is a blessing as no down time.

Another important way to protect from data curruption is to have UPS's on all equipment, I have a 60KVA UPS for this.
 
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#12 ·
Creating a disk image is best suited in order to save and continue to safely use your data. Disc image software in this point could be very handy both for personal and business use, for example you want to replace an old hard drive, that has dozens of programs, systems settings and so on, with a new drive. Or you just want to keep a system backup just in case.
 
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