Building a Graphics Workstation: Backup
June 17, 2008
Backup of Data
There are several differences between requirements to backup your OS and data. If you loose hard drive with OS, you can usually reinstall again everything (providing you still have CDs/DVDs and serial numbers :-) although it will take you some time (days).
Over the years the size of your data can reach hundred GBs or few TBs. It is impractical to copy all of your data each time you want to back up your system. So you are left with a some form of incremental backup when only new and changed files are copied.
Over the years I tried several different ways how to backup the data. Neither of these methods lead to 100% satisfaction. I will describe the backup method that I use currently but I suggest that you read more about the topic and then choose the method that suits your needs.
Choice of Backup Media
Up to now I have been using two high capacity SATA hard drives mounted to removable mobile racks as my primary backup, rotating on weekly basis. Instead of removable brackets you can now use even simpler new eSATA docket stations which are becoming available. Based on your paranoia you can increase the number of hard drives which contain copies of your data. You can take one of the hard drives and store it off site, and change it on a rotational basis as it suits you. Data which I considered more important I occasionally burned to DVD. In the near future backup to Blue Ray discs will likely become efficient, and similarly on-line backup will become more feasible.
Properly set up SATA mode on the motherboard should allow hot plugging - you can connect your backup hard drive only when needed. If the backup hard drive is not physically connected to your workstation, it decreases the chance of data loss due to user error, virus, power surge etc. If it is stored off site, it will provide additional protection in the case of fire, flooding, burglary, earthquake etc. Of course, the more often you backup your data, the less data there will be to loose since your last backup. If the backup system is not set up efficiently, one might be tempted to skip backups when one is too busy - and this is the time when a lots of data is being generated which needs to be backed up :-)
Choice of Backup Software
Over the course of the years I have tried several backup methods and applications, including Acronis, Retrospect and writing my own backup scripts. I came to conclusion that simple, easy to read and therefore easy to restore exact copy of my data suits me the best. I settled on simple Microsoft application SyncToy which is a free download. The manual how to use it is available here. I have it set up to echo My Documents folder to backup hard drive. Only new and changed documents are copied, so the amount of daily work does not take a long to copy.NTFS file system is currently mature, stable system, which you can access even in Linux. Many external hard drives come with their backup utilities, you can choose one which suits you the best.
Testing the Backup System
This is a crucial step when setting up your backup system. For obvious reasons you need to successfully test that you are able to restore your operating system and data. There are so many steps involved in the backup process and restore, that the likelihood of failure is significant.
The most likely reasons of data loss is a user error or a hard drive failure. To test the ability to restore the operating system from its backup image due to these most common errors, you will need another hard drive - test hard drive: remove your original hard drive from the computer or at least disconnect it. Install test hard drive to which you will try to restore the image of OS. Boot from Acronis Bootable Rescue Media CD. Make sure that you can identify hard drives installed in the system e.g. by their size. I recommend that you remove/ disconnect all the hard drives with important data on them when testing your backup system. It is easy to make a mistake and restore to a wrong partition, overwriting useful data.
Next check if Acronis is able to 'see' the hard drive where the backup image is stored (generally USB, EIDE, SATA hard drives are OK). Check if Acronis can 'see' the new test hard drive and try to restore your OS to it (RAID volumes can cause problems sometimes). If the restore was successful, try to reboot from the test hard drive. If you can boot into Windows as usual, you successfully tested the backup system of your OS :-) Remove the test hard drive and install back/ plug in your original hard drive. You can now do anything to your OS installation knowing that you will be able to revert back to its previous state in about 30 min. At this stage you might consider turning off System Restore in Windows XP.
To test reliability of the data/ photographs backup system, you will need to compare original 'My Documents' folder with its backup variant. While there are many utilities offering folder compare function, given the stability of NTFS file system on Windows XP I usually only compare the total size and number of files in each folder. You can also run SyncToy repeatedly.
After you went through all these steps you can understand that designing backup system with 100% guarantee is difficult and perhaps inefficient. The right balance between the degree of reliability of your backup system and effort required to achieve this is very individual.