Backup for HDD?

Hi, has anyone of you using any form of high speed backup solution for your ToughBook?

I am trying find out if it is feasible and possible to connect a RAID hdd enclosure such as ICYDOCK to a ToughBook. I can't find any indication that ToughBook has an e-SATA port - I know it can be done using usb, but usb will take ages to transfer even just 100GB of data.

I'm also researching on the possibility of having the notebook run RAID 1, which I saw has been done on some gaming machine.

Having backup is important since no notebook is indestructible.

What do you guys think?

 

Depends on the Toughbook. Your best bet... Set up your drive and then clone it. Then you have the benchmark. I have been doing that for years.

 

To me the key thing with backup is not how much data, but how often.

To put it another way, it may take hours to copy all your data to another drive, but to update that with the new data of the day will probably only take minutes. I do it every night - automatically over Wi-Fi so I don't have to actually remember!

 

Hi, incremental backup, this is interesting, are you doing it manually or using software? Thanks.

 

Could you not use Acronis True Image for this. I know this has saved me more than once. Back it up to a external harddrive's. This might be over kill but I run 4 external HDD's , 1-120GB for cloning my HDD, 1-500GB for movies/music, 1-250GB for programs/data and 2 terabyte for a full back of all . I have lost everything once before and said it would not happen again.

 

My notebook comes with 500GB drive, partitioned into 2 equal C and D drives. I'm planning to connect the notebook to a 1TB x 2 2-bay HDD enclosure running RAID 1, where I will store all my data, software installers, and also the backup image of my notebook hhd.

Program files will remain on the notebook C drive. On a regular basis, I'll copy all the data and software installers on the RAID enclosure to empty D drive of the notebook, so if the RAID setup screws up, I'll have at least an outdated version of the data on the notebook HDD.

For high speed transfers to/from RAID enclosure, I'll use e-SATA.

Initially, I even wanted put the notebook built-in hdd on RAID 1, but I can't find a notebook with RAID feature on board, and don't want to mess around with software RAID.

 

As previously said, I also believe the way to go is incremental backups.

The first time you backup it will take ages. But then it will be really quick.

Look into UNISON. It is a very very (very) powerful backup tool.

You can use it to keep to copies synchronized, but you can also use it to keep backups with previous versions. So if you don't like the changes that you have made to your thesis, or you delete a big paper and propagate those changes you can simply go to a previous version and recover it.

I do believe it is genius, but it is not apple time machine (it has a learning curve ?steep?).

good luck and remember to back up daily.

 

Forgot the link:

Unison File Synchronizer

by the way this is probably the only tool that can synchronize/backup from Microsoft to Linux and vice verse

 

Thanks for the tip. Tried a couple days back, looks like a "mirroring software" which records deletion also. Do you use it for NAS?

 

Keep in mind RAID1 is not a form of backup, it is redundancy. If a wild virus destroys files on the first HD, it will also be destroyed on the mirror.

Goodsync is a good windows backup/sync program. Lots of options to cater for your needs. Not free but there is a fully functional 30 day trial, after that your limited to 100 files & 3 jobs or less.

 

My experience is that backing up to the internal SATA drive is the fastest backup media, by far - much faster than to USB storage. FWIW, I then copy it (the backup file) to the offline media of choice. For me that is a 32GB USB flash drive on which I have put a bootable copy of the backup/restore program. It takes a long time to copy the backup image, and it requires having divided the internal drive into an OS and a data partition (to keep the OS image small enough to fit on the flash drive), but the result is something that lets me really easily recover from a drive or OS problem.

 

Not a Toughbook, but you can get a "Dull" Precision M6500 Mobile Workstation with "optional RAID 0 or 1 storage for performance or redundancy."

The keyword there is workstation: these aren't your typical laptops but are designed and spec'd to be used for resource intensive applications such as software development, engineering, modeling, etc.



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