fblittle

Any reason why you cannot "clone" the exisiting drive with third party software?

I understand from all the replies that the 100MB primary partition does not change over time?

In that case I think I will make a clone first then mirror the two drives partitions in Disk management.

What way have others done it?
Hardware RAID 1. I would have to use two ports on my 8 port RAID card, don't want to take up two ports out of eight for that.
Is there any other simple hardware solutions?
Can it be done in the BIOS?

Scott Moulton is an awsome Guest. I can't wait for his next time on BYOB. I want to ask if the hosts can ask him what the drawbacks of using USB3 instead eSATA on an external drive box, like DROBO or Synology etc. . . for RAID or just JBOD etc. . .

In the past he has discouraged the use of USB to connect drives because of Command Queing and SMART.

"My Hard Drive Died" podcast was my favorite podcast (next to BYOB of course) in the past, so it is very good to hear him again on this podcast. If you could make him a semi regular guest he can enlighten us on many storage topics. He is very good at all aspects of RAID systems. One more thing, Ask him about RAID Cards, Brands, types etc . . .

Resurrecting an old thread.

I usually mount my PC up on my desk of somewhere off at least a foot off the ground. This significantly reduces the ammont of dust entering the PC case. My just retired PC has been more than 2 years (Started as Win Vista) and has hardly any dust in it. Before when I set the case on the floor I had to vacuum out large ammounts of dust every few months. I have no dust filters.

...you should check on what power supply is in your system. If you have a PFC supply, then I would not replace the batteries but rather buy a current one that supports PFC. IF you have a non PFC supply then go for the batteries.

Interesting. What is a PFC supply? and what is the logic behind replacing either the battery or the Supply? Did you mean your PC supply, or the UPS supply?

PCDOC, Thanks for the kind words. I am not sure why I experienced the reliability issues, maybe a fluke, but I experienced it at work and at home in different situations. What happened is that Acronis could not find the network path and folder so it gave up on the backup more than 1/2 the time, at first I thought it was my WHS2011 but it did it at one place where I work at on a *.gov network as well. Maybe not conclusive, but that was my experience. However, I installed Paragon on the same machine and backed up to the same network folder and it completed the full as well as differential backups everytime. By contrast, I also used Ghost and it did completed all the backups, but failed frequently on the restore. What good is a Backup image if you can't rely on the restore being good?

After My Post I realized that I didn't mention the restore function. For Backup and Recovery software, Recovery is probably even more important than Backup for obvious reasons, if you can't recover there is no need to Backup. So Recovery is worth a mention.

Paragon uses Archive files for the sector based images. They start with arc_******.PBF the archive is automatically named with a date and time code which can be altered to what ever you want before the backup is started. When the archive is finished it is recorded in the UI under the Archive tab as a archive file so that it can be selected for a recovery or it can be used to create a differential of incremental backup using the full disk archive as a base archive to start from. You can exclued any files you want in the Exclued settings and comperss the archive as well. I have used the most aggressive compression and it doesn't add that much time to the backup, especially if it is backing up at nite while your asleep, but it can save you a lot of space.

Paragon provides a second file with the download that will make a DVD boot disk to recover your machine with, in fact they provide two different methods to recover with the WinPE disk is made with the file they provide with the download, the second is made from the UI and is not a Win PE recovery disk, this disk is based on Linux, but works as also but with less features.

When your hard disk fails you can just replace the drive and run the Win PE recovery disk that you made. You can make this disk at any time even after your hard disk fails. When you boot with this disk it is like installing windows, you get the "Starting Windows" screen, then it transitions into the Paragon UI, it works and looks just like the desktop version, so it is easy to use if you are used to the desktop version. There is a restore Wizard that you use to recover with, it is just as easy as the "Smart Backup" Wizard, but in reverse. Recovery takes only a few minutes from a network, USB, or second disk(SATA Port), archive.

The reason I like Paragon for recovery better is the "Adaptive Restore" tool That means you can either recover your system with a new disk, or you can install your system on a new PC and Adaptive Restore will find the drivers for your new PC so that you can boot the Old OS on the new PC. You may need to replace some drivers later to optomize things, or install drivers non-essential for booting later, but you can boot into your old PC enviornment on your new PC.

This function is really important for us at work because the customer may have an old PC that dies or becomes outdated. We can take that backup archive and install it to a new PC even if the drives were of a different type. This can save hours of work. Acronis has this function as well, but most people don't have it because it is an add on called "Plus Pack" and is an additional $20 or so. I haven't used the Acronis version, but I am sure that it works as well. Of course Paragon claims that for some reason that theirs works better. I think it's because of their Virtual adjust technology.

The last feature that I want to mention for a few people here that run virtual machines is a feature that other products may have as well called P2V and V2P and V2V and P2P and OS to SSD. V = Virtual, and P = Physical, so you can backup your OS to a VMD and run it on your Virtual Machine for testing. You can store your Physical machine in a Virtual Disk and recover from it, or run it on your VM and restore it later.

There are so many features to this software the they can't all be mentioned here or you would fall asleep before your were done reading, Maybe you already have? I will if I don't quit now.