How to shadow a SSD for safety?

[hyeedo]

Hi, I just got my first SSD drive which was a 60Gb corsair force 3 for $115, with a msi h61 e23 motherboard.
I also purchased a 500 gig Hitachi 7200 rpm hard drive.
I will be using quick books on this computer in a office that will be running it for most of the day. In case of failure I need some way for the office users to be able to have access to the computer.
So would it be possible for whatever is on the SSD to be loaded on the hard drive without losing performance? I understand the hard drive has an extra 400 Gb over the ssd drive.

 

[curtis_87]

Im struggling a little to think about what exactly you mean, if the SSD dies then there goes your boot drive, data on the 2nd drive will remain there but wont be accessable untill you replace the SSD with another bootable drive, do you feel happy with someone opening up your rig?.. or..the other alternative would be to stick puppy linux onto a flash drive and they can boot from that flash drive then copy what they need off it, if they have shared a folder over the network you should be able to find it and push it from ur pc to theirs that way.

If you need them to access your data also and are worried about the SSD again, my second thought would be use a file server share elsewhere on the network (RAID setup for redundancy?). Create the folder structure and access right for different dir levels and users, then work from there when you save your files. Then if your rig pops it clogs the rest of your staff can still carry on while you redo your PC.

or....third option clone the corsair onto the 500 gig hitachi to make it bootable, then set up the rest of your partitions and options, once you have booted from the hitachi, and execute a batch file to copy the files from SSD location to the hitachi when you log off.
That way if the SSD fails to detect then the next bootable drive will already have your files and boot into an eviroment where they can access the shares..though if the SSD is detectable and you are having boot problems it will likely hang or just contiuously reboot until you manually select the second hard drive...

 

[hyeedo]

My apologies for the misunderstanding. The hard drive is not mine but my uncles for his workplace to print invoices for clients off quickbooks. Client data is very important, from what I am aware they save copies of it on removable drives - flash, external hard drive. However I want to avoid down times as much as possible in the case of failure since many people online state their ssd failed out of warning.

I like the third idea you stated about cloning the hard drive. And if I havent misunderstood if the SSD fails I can have them set the boot drive to be the Hitachi from bios and it will temporarily solve the issue.
How would I proceed to have it clone and automatically copy files from SSD location to the Hitachi.
This would be of great help to me.

 

[chesteracorgi]

Curtis' strategy is a good one, but the simple solution is to set up a regular backup routine. The frequency of the backup should reflect the business needs. You should backup at minimum, one a week and, at maximum several times a day depending on the amount of new data. The backups will establish restore points where you can recover everything up to the restore point.

 

[hyeedo]

What do you mean by set up backup? And how would I restore in a failure?

 

[JohnnyLucky]

I agree with Chesteracorgi.

You can simply make backup copies of the data. Backup is a Microsoft Windows feature and it can be set to do automatic backups. Here is a link to the Mircrosoft Windows help page that explains the backup and restore features:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/features/backup-and-restore

There are more links on that page for learning how to backup and restore, frequently asked questions, and a video clip demonstration.

 

[hyeedo]

Thanks I went ahead and read that. What im confused about is say I create an image backup on the other hard drive. And create a system repair disc. But continue backing up. Then when the OS drive crashes. And I use the repair disk to boot. Will the repair disk backup using whats on my other hard drive which I created the images on weekly?

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Yes, that is the idea. Use the Windows restore feature to get the the billing files that were backed-up. You can choose whether you want to restore the most recent backup or an older backup. Normally you would choose the most recent backup. You can also choose restore individual files, multiple files, or all files in a backup.

 

[curtis_87]

+1 to Chesteracorgi on the regularity of data backups. Though this does mean that if the SSD dies while using it that if he is not about someone has to boot up and mess arround restoring the backups, and choose what to restore. Now if its hyeedo doing this fair enough, but how much do you trust someone else in your office to be able to do the right thing while you are away? You can minimise the chance of them restoring something you dont want like registry settings by not selecting it in the back up process.

But that will still just leave a big file that is not directly accessable(correct me of am wrong) and the PC then needs to be bootable in some way, two problems.With option 3 above, if the SSD dies you just tell someone to hit the reset button on the front of the case then keep taping say F8 (thats what it is for my MB) to choose to boot from a different source, you'll have to find out what it is for yours) and select the hitachi. It boots normally cause you have set up the copies etc. And your not in a blind panic trying to work out how to get back to the office before whats her/his name from the accounts department has a break down cause she cant get those files you have, and also the additional time needed to restore the back up.

By all means back up regularly, our server does it 3 times a day and full back up made at the end of the week.

From what hyeedo has said I'm concerned with how the office will access this data quickly when s/he is not there in the event of failure. Option 3 while not the most gracefull, and combine that with backups and you've covered what they can do in the event of a failure, and solve a problem then and there, then you can take your time and nit pick about what to restore in windows when you have time.

But thats just my opinion.