How do you spell "relief"?

[timcsaw]

I spell relief by "having triple redundancy on my main, Desktop PC"!

I've just gone through the common nightmare of having to "rebuild" my desktop PC. I have all of my personal files and data backed up (LIKE WE ALL DO RIGHT?!?), but not the Operating System and the "appearance" and "familiarity" of the desktop, file folder layout, favorites etc, and of course all of the actual programs installed, that have to be re-installed (virus suite, MS Office, Photoshop, printers, etc. etc. etc.).

Even though I (we) regularly back up our personal stuff (RIGHT?!?!), it really bites when I loose a boot drive to failure and have to jump through hoops to get things back to some form of familiarity and normalcy (anyone who's ever had a serious crash, knows what I'm talking about.)

To avoid the inevitable crash I used a RAID to protect myself and my operating system (two 500gig drives which appear in the system as ONE 500gig drive (actually two separate drives that "mirror" each other)) and I thought I was safe. WRONG! If the RAID boot drive(s), gets the Master Boot Record (MBR) corrupted, BOTH drives get corrupted and NEITHER will boot the machine. The RAID provides a bit of a speed increase, and is also great if one of the drives actually fries, but if one gets corrupt data, they both get corrupt data.

Solution; After going to all of the above and getting the PC back up and running with all of my main programs, files, favorites, and something similar and somewhat familiar to what it was before it died, I purchased a hard drive bay that installs into the PC that is accessible from the front of the PC (like a DVD player is), and you can actually plug an entire 3.5in hard drive into the bay (sort of like an old ZIP Drive cartridge). I then put a new 500gig hard drive in this bay, and did a complete disk-copy TO it, so that it is exactly like the 500gig RAID drive(s). Then I took this new "backup" drive out of the bay and stored it away.

This now gives me a second level of redundancy - the RAID itself, AND a hard drive I can pop into the bay to boot from if needed.

For a THIRD level of redundancy (for this PC), I also bought a 2 terabyte external drive, and created a disk image of the boot drive onto it (a disk image of my main desktop pc) ... BONUS; I will also use this 2TB external drive to create images of each of the 5 other PCs on my network to give them some redundancy that they didn't previously have.

Far and away, my main desktop PC is the most important one (and the most difficult to "re-build" if it dies), so I am VERY relieved to know that I now have TRIPLE redundancy on it, AND it only cost me a couple hundred bucks! Details available on request.

I am a very, happy camper!:thumbup:

(if you've read all of this and didn't understand what the heck I was talking about, then THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS!!!)

 

[Bushman5]

I totally understood. I ook have much redunancy buil into my pc.

got a Antec DarkFleet85 full tower chassis, with a hotswap 2.5" SATA drive bay on top - thats here i back up my photos. In addition i have a 1TB USB external drive for the system image backup, and another 2TB external drive for the main backup. I also back up documents onto a bitlocker AND truecrypt encrypted USB key

 

[stitchawl]

I'm as fanatical about it as you! I keep absolutely NO data on my C drive, only applications and OS. Everything else gets stored in external drives. I have five 1.5T externals, with two of them being just back-up material. If I get some sort of serious problem with my main drive, I can flush it, re-format, do a cold install of the OS, install the applications, and then.... I over write the application data so each program looks and feels exactly as I had set it up before. The only down side to my method is the time it takes waiting while programs install. Once that's done, my system is up and running exactly as it was before the problem occurred, with no loss of data.

Stitchawl

 

[timcsaw]

I'm as fanatical about it as you! I keep absolutely NO data on my C drive, only applications and OS. Everything else gets stored in external drives. I have five 1.5T externals, with two of them being just back-up material. If I get some sort of serious problem with my main drive, I can flush it, re-format, do a cold install of the OS, install the applications, and then.... I over write the application data so each program looks and feels exactly as I had set it up before. The only down side to my method is the time it takes waiting while programs install. Once that's done, my system is up and running exactly as it was before the problem occurred, with no loss of data.

Stitchawl

Glad to here I'm not alone in my madness!:thumbup:

Re. my bold above, this is why I do the disk copy to a spare drive after I get all of my programs installed... saves me a lot of time and aggravation.

 

[stitchawl]

Glad to here I'm not alone in my madness!:thumbup:

Re. my bold above, this is why I do the disk copy to a spare drive after I get all of my programs installed... saves me a lot of time and aggravation.

I think I'm going to try that. Cleaning the C drive is something that I like to do fairly often as I do a LOT of installing and deleting programs, trying them out. I also download a lot of fileshared torrent files, and many of them come in with malware and virus problems. I run some very heavy duty security with triple redundancy, (the anti-virus software updates hourly,) but even so every once in a while something sneaks in. I think the next time I do a clean install I'll do a full disk copy too. That could really save a lot of time spent sitting around waiting.

Stitchawl

 

[AeroNautiCal]

How do you spell "relief"?

Whatever you do, Don't ask this question on W&C...

Skinny Joe will offer waaaaaaay too much information!

 

[timcsaw]

I think I'm going to try that. Cleaning the C drive is something that I like to do fairly often as I do a LOT of installing and deleting programs, trying them out. I also download a lot of fileshared torrent files, and many of them come in with malware and virus problems. I run some very heavy duty security with triple redundancy, (the anti-virus software updates hourly,) but even so every once in a while something sneaks in. I think the next time I do a clean install I'll do a full disk copy too. That could really save a lot of time spent sitting around waiting.

Stitchawl

It's actually pretty simple if you get one of those hard drive bays that you install in a free front accessible slot. You pop in a drive of the same make and model as your current boot drive (C:/), then do an exact drive copy from C:/ onto the drive in Antec bay. If things get screwed up on the REAL, internal boot drive C:/, you just pop other drive into the Antec, boot to it, and then copy it's contents back to your internal. (I have this sort of setup now, but as an added measure of redundancy I also make an "image" of my clean boot drive on a 2TB external drive... just in case).

I bought an Antec (I think) drive bay for a About $30 if I recall. Then I bought a "spare" hard drive for it that was the same model and size as my existing, internal hard drive (a 500gig SATA) for about $60.

Acronis or Norton Ghost will do the copying back and forth quite nicely. One advantage of the Acronis program is that it will even reformat the drive you are copying TO during the process! Additionally, if you get the "bonus pack" from Acronis, it will allow you to restore a drive image from "dissimilar" hardware. For example lets say your internal boot drive is a 250gig, but you have a 500 gig as a spare... The add-on pack from Acronis will STILL let you go between the two "dissimilar" drives (as long as the image will fit). In my case, I have exact duplicate drives so it isn't an issue, but who knows what I'll have in the future... as the old saying goes, you can NEVER have enough storage space!