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Joined: Feb 16, 2005 Posts: 1393 Location: near nottingham
My good lady runs her own business and needs a shiny new PC for her shiny new office. It would be a standalone pc - at east for now
I always build my own PC and historically always overclocked the funk out of them - just because.
But as this PC has a serious use and reliability is the key, I'm not gonna do that and anyway, there really is no need cos she just wants to do is run simple applications.
What I do want to do is make sure she has a robust back up system, as the last thing she wants is any data loss, so I'm after some tips on the best way to set this up.
Should I do this on a hard disk approach, or back up tapes, or something else? Ideally I just want it to be automatic, that way it limits input and 'oops I forgot to do it'.
The other thing is, I'm a little out of touch with the latest technology, so I may be about to suggest something slightly backwards, but I am thinking of the following:
a single small (40Gb or similar) SATA high speed drive, for the OS (is the new windows worth bothering with?)
The and this is for the duplication of data - two 160Gb SATA drives a Raid 1 array.
Would i need some other backup system with this - because whilst it would have redundancy for drive failure and viruses, without slowing things down, like a data duplication system on a partitioned single Hard drive would I'm assuming things would still go bad with file corruption, as surely the files would corrupt the same on both drives? dunno, maybe not.
Advice please gurus!
Cheers _________________ slobbysoft (TM) - "Turning sexual assault into a legitimate business"
www.myspace.com/slobdog
As a "computer geek" who never backs up you might want to take what I say with a shovel of salt- any external USB 2.0 or Firewire hard drive with Dantz Retrospect scheduled to do automatic backups should do the trick.
That, combined with the redundancy of a mirrored RAID array should pretty much ensure you never have a catastrophic data loss... unless your house burns down of course.
I'd suggest also doing DVD backups once in a while, unless you can find something to levitate DVDs into your drive they're pretty much impossible to fully automate though.
Backup tapes also can't be automated (if you rotate them like you should) and are somewhat of an overkill solution.
My entirely luck and good fortune based backup scheme has yet to fail me, though!
Joined: Apr 19, 2005 Posts: 5138 Location: At the bottom of the garden, amongst the birds and the bees
slobdog wrote:
a single small (40Gb or similar) SATA high speed drive, for the OS (is the new windows worth bothering with?)
The and this is for the duplication of data - two 160Gb SATA drives a Raid 1 array.
I'd say that would be fine - if it's business-based, then presuambly you'll have a decent firewall, virus checker and spyware molester on it and they shouldn't pose a real problem. Harddrive failure is pretty rare too, as is file corruption (at least in my experience) - if it's a software based error than yes it will be on both drives, but obviously hardware problems will be isolated.
In my experience, most people have at least one automated system and one manual - your RAID sorts out the automatic one, and your manual can just be backing up all your documents on CD/DVD/flash drive/external HDD.
If you want to be really cautious, then get FOUR drives, in two RAID1 pairs - use one pair (1 and 2) like you said, and then use the second pair (3 and 4) as a backup for the first. You can then back up drive 1 onto 3 and 4 simultaneously, and you effectively have four copies of your data. If you can be bothered, store the second pair somewhere offsite and only put it in the computer once a week (or whatever) to make your backups.
And personally, I steer clear of new versions of Windows for at least a year (preferrably 2) before I install them - that gives Microsoft a chance to release enough patchs to make it stable. That especially applies with Vista because applications are being updated to work with it.
Steve _________________ If you're insulted, you're reading it wrong. You fucking imbecile.
"Enlightenment at the cost of my wings is not a price I am willing to pay"
Joined: Feb 13, 2005 Posts: 3962 Location: The Rock Boudoir
Premium Member
Aye - fault tolerance and DVD backups are the new black. _________________ Keep up with local events and plug your own gigs!
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Joined: Feb 16, 2005 Posts: 1393 Location: near nottingham
Thanks guys.
I think the raid and dvd back ups are the way forward!
I'll give the dual raid 1 idea some thought (isn't that called raid 3????) Depends on the cost of hard drives for that extra bit piece of mind and yeah it woud ideally be on seperate PC.
Could an automated backup be worked in via an FTP upload once a week? Or is that just stupid?
Think I'll leave Vista for now, can always update after the bugs have been mostly sorted.
Oh and the spyware / security / antivirus is a given! I've always used AVG free, I suppose I'll buy her the business version as that would be the done thing!
Oh and I just re-read my original post - it barely made sense!! That'll teach me to type things in a rush to get down the pub! _________________ slobbysoft (TM) - "Turning sexual assault into a legitimate business"
www.myspace.com/slobdog
the terastation is good, plug it into your network and use it as a network storage device... map a drive on your machine to it, and schedule a backup... having 1TB of space is handy too... and you can use alot of them as streaming media servers for your mp3s and videos... they come in RAID5 formation too, so if you get a dead drive, plug a new one in and it wil rebuild the RAID without any data loss...
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