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Well I'm going to say a few things here, but let me caveate that this is part of what I do for a living and have been for 13 going on 14 years now. I don't say that to attempt to trump others, just to establish that I have a clue here or there about IT in both the small/medium business all the way through to Fortune 10 companies.
1. You get what you pay for. Just like in our fetish for fire arms.
2. RAID1 sounds snappy and in a server that has the capacity I often set up the OS/App partitions on a RAID1 disk set. NEVER for critical data!!!!!!
Why am I bashing the RAID1 concept so many people here (professionals to boot)... well it is a simple thing called data corruption and that is but the first of many concerns I have with the recommendation to utilize RAID as your safety net for your business and lively hood. For example - yes I've seen this happen about 10 times too many - Should the data on the primary disk become corrupted, that corruption is written to the second disk as well. Virus threats as one of many examples have brought this fundimental fault to light in the last 10 years. Then again this can be said for all RAID based systems. Additionally you retain the single point of failure in the controller. Redundancy does not come from allowing single points of failure. A lot of folks are starting to use what is called "The 3rd Mirror" but I won't go into that in detail, lets just say that it's a 3rd disk that takes point in time snap shots of the Mirrored drives. In essence it's a backup of a Mirror configuration (e.g RAID1)
There are simple ways to impliment a consistent backup plan and process, but without operator commitment, none of it will work. We can fairly easily, with native tools, create a backup solution that will more than meet the need. Large disks are readily available and cheap.
I don't mean to belittle any of the recommendations made, but considering that we in the US Fish and Wildlife service aren't exactly funding rich, we have to impliment solid solutions at low cost, to sites and facilities that are either not directly supported onsite and/or have very poor connectivity to the rest of the service.... the number of sites is in excess of 400 and we are in the process in implimenting these solutions now. To that end we are utilizing low cost NAS (Network Area Storage) devices and external USB drives to do this. Along with a rather spiffy, but proprietary process to ensure backups are made daily.. damn flight migration patterns are really important to these guys for some reason.
I don't think a NAS is required here, but buying a few (about 5 or so) mid sized external USB 2.0 drives, using NTBackup or something simular to automate the process, and simply taking that weeks drive home with you at the end of the week, will give you what you're looking for. Then again, testing and practicing the restorations are at least as important as making the backup. That is the single most common failure of folks who think they are safe because they have a backup...
Setting this all up shouldn't take more than a few hours (scheduling backup sets, unpacking, labeling and formating/testing all the drives) and discussing what is actually taking place. Maybe even just writing down the backup and restore steps as well.
If no one else has offered to do a setup/config for you, just let me know. I can swing down one evening after work and we can knock it all out. I won't charge a club member for my time.. I'm too damn pricey as it stands and I'm already spending your tax money, willingly and with a smile, every day of the week.
If you're wanting to discuss disaster recovery (shop burns, gets robbed, yada yada) we can talk about the different concepts and issues there as well. DR can be done on the cheap or all the way into the 100's of millions depending on the exact need.
Again, let me know and I'll start sketching and pricing out some options.. this isn't a big deal and won't be nearly as painful as some things we already do - shoot a .50 cal for instance - :cool:
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Once again thanks for all the help guys. I bought a external USB drive and gave it to the forensic people to put the recovered data on. I got everything I needed and am back up and running and I didn't lose anything.
It's ironic that several of you mentioned data corruption as that is exactley what happend. My drive was mechanically fine the data just got corrupted.
I do however need to be able to back this up even if I have to do it manually every night before I go home. I have the external USB drive now to use for this and I also have ghost so I could do DVD backups also just to be extra safe.
Badshot if you have any suggestion I am all ears. I only need to back up one PC the other PC out in the shop is not a big deal as it has no data just software. If it crashes I simply reload everything and I'm done. Depending on how much trouble it is I may back it up also if it would help me get it up and running faster in the event of a crash.
Thanks for all the help guys.
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You can schedule backups to the USB drive using Backup under system tools in XP.
Also you need to be sure and defrag C:\ drive about once a week, and I like to run scandisk every couple of months.
If your program is using a database of sorts, it should have a tool for cleaning it up every so often. I would try and run it every couple of weeks or so.
