Building a Graphics Workstation: Backup
June 21, 2008
This is in my opinion probably the most complex topic in the process of building your graphic workstation. I will offer some solutions but I am afraid I cannot provide 100% solution because I have not find it yet :-)
The amount of effort that people put into backing up their data depends on their understanding of risks of losing the data and the value of data to them. Often we begin to understand the value of something after we have lost it. So I suggest that you make a short mental experiment and think about the ways how your data can be lost and what would you do then... :-)
I would divide backing up the data into two categories:
- Backing up the operating system
- Backing up user data (e.g. photographs)
The reason for this separation of OS from data is the fact that I believe they both need different strategies to make the backup process efficient.
Backing up the Operating System
The status of the OS should generally change not very often and the change should be controlled by user (e.g. installation of new application, updates and patches etc.). If you set up your system properly, you should know when you are making significant changes to your operating system and therefore when to back up your operating system. I do not think there is a need to do it more often (e.g. daily).
Windows XP operating system cannot be simply copied to another location. Certain system files are locked and cannot be accessed even when you boot in Windows safe mode. In the past the only option was to load different operating system (DOS or Linux) and use backup utility from there.
During the course of the years I tried several products and eventually settled on Acronis True Image. The 'Home' version is sufficient. The reasons why I chose this product are:
- It works from Windows. You do not need load another OS.
- It creates 'image' of the partition where Windows is installed which is significantly faster than copying files. If you keep your Windows installation 'clean and slim' the resulting image will be only few GB large and the whole backup will take 2-3 min only.
- It skips pagefile.sys and hibernating file which you do not need to restore
- I had the highest restore success rate with this product. (Since I start using it I had to use it to restore the OS about 15-20 times and most of the time successfully without much of an additional tweaking :-)
Acronis provides detailed manuals, so I will not repeat that information here. But to use Acronis efficiently you have to set up your system in a certain way: you need to separate the operating system from the data onto different partitions.
If you have Seagate hard drives installed in your system, then Seagate allows download of their DiscWizard. DiscWizard is based on a previous version of Acronis True Image and offers the same functionality. It will check if you have Seagate drives installed and refuse to run if you don't. Unfortunately it does not recognize Seagate drives connected to RAID controller.
Given that in properly set up system the size of Acronis backup image of OS is only about 4-6 GB, it might be useful to maintain several sequential backups in the case you need to restore to a certain state from a while ago.
Sometimes when you restore your backup image to a different hard drive (e.g. in the case of a OS hard drive failure), MBR (Master Boot Record) does not get properly restored. That will prevent you from booting into the restored operating system. It is possible to repair MBR from Windows recovery console. Another useful option worth mentioning is 'Hard drive cloning'. Both Acronis and DiscWizard allow creating an exact copy of your OS hard drive to another hard drive of a similar size (you can adjust partition sizes to certain degree in the process). Because you are creating a copy of your entire hard drive, not only OS, the process can take a while. On the other hand I have never found any problems booting from the resulting copy. If you can justify keeping a backup hard drive for your OS and the time it requires to create a 'clone' on every occasion, then all you need to do in the case of OS hard drive failure is to swap the failed hard drive for a backup and restart your computer.