Best backup solution

legendaryeagle · Nov 11, 2015

I am in the process of trying to determine the best backup solution for my PC. I have a Windows 7 system with an ASUS Sabertooth Z77 motherboard with 2 drives. A 120 GB SSD, which holds the OS, and a 1 TB internal hard drive, which holds programs and data.

What I want is a hands free system to have a clone of each drive. I am already using Carbonite, so I have offsite data backup. But I want to have a backup drive that I can swap into place in the even of either drive failing.

I am not sure what the best solution is, or what I need. Do I get an external drive enclosure with a RAID controller and set up some sort of RAID system? Do I get an internal RAID controller and set it up internally? Is there some kind of software solution that I can use to have an automated clone?

What solution would you recommend?

USAFRet · Nov 11, 2015

Macrium Reflect and Casper will do full disk imaging, on a schedule you set up.
That should be all you need.

mjslakeridge · Nov 11, 2015

Also, Acronis True Image allows you to schedule backups on pretty much any schedule you choose. Works great for me, although I do my scheduling manually about once a month since not much changes on my system.

legendaryeagle · Nov 11, 2015

USAFRet :

Thanks. I am looking for more of a real-time replication type solution. I'm a consultant, and do all of my software development from my home computer. Like I said, I have Carbonite, and also use source control for my code, so the data is safely backed up. However, I lost my mechanical hard drive recently, and it took nearly a week to restore everything from Carbonite. Obviously, I can't be down that long, as clients are depending on me. I need something that I can just swap out and keep on trucking.

I was just curious to see if anyone had a nice setup like this that they could share their info on. Seems like maybe a RAID array with mirroring would be ideal, but I wasn't sure if someone had some other suggestions. ViceVersa was one thing that I've looked at for real-time replication, but it just seems to just be for files, and not the complete drive.

USAFRet · Nov 11, 2015

Well...the only 'realtime' is a RAID 1.

But that also has certain drawbacks. Yes, the drives are mirrored. But that also means any file deletion, corruption, virus, whatever...is also mirrored.
A RAID 1 allows a business that absolutely needs 24/7 uptime (a webstore, perhaps) to continue to limp along with one drive, until the dead one can be replaced.
Any business that would use a RAID 1 also has an actual backup.

A daily or nightly incremental drive image will allow you to go back a day or two, before the bad thing happened.

Doing both might not be a bad idea, but don't rely on only a RAID to protect your data.

legendaryeagle · Nov 11, 2015

True. That's why I thought to check around for ideas. Maybe the best solution is an external enclosure with a 2nd 120GB SSD, and a 2nd 1TB mechanical drive. Then, I could just do a nightly drive image to them. Might lose a little work with a drive failure, but not enough to be a significant impact.

USAFRet · Nov 11, 2015

legendaryeagle :

A single 2 or 3TB external will work for this.
Incremental images of each drive in its own folder tree.
C_Drive_Images and D_Drive_Images.

In case things go bad, recover from whatever backup works best.
The above mentioned tools will create a bootable recovery DVD, to take the relevant image you select and restore it on a drive.

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