Okay, here’s my situation. I use my main computer for my home-based business, and it’s essential that I protect my data and keep the system running with as little downtime as possible.
For the last few years I’ve been backing up to Travan 10 GB tapes, full backups once a week, and incrementals every night. But a full backup now requires three tapes, so it’s become a pain because I can’t run them overnight unattended.
Thinking I had a solution, I upgraded the two hard disks from 40GB to 120GB. My plan was to back up the operating system and data (which I keep on separate hard disks) to other partitions on the opposite disk, so that if one disk fails, I can simply restore from the other.
I had planned to use PowerQuest’s Drive Image 7, but on installation it corrupted my Windows 2000 installation so badly that I had to reinstall the whole operating system and all my applications. (The problem could have occurred during the installation of Microsoft’s .NET structure, which DI 7 requires.) This took about a week to fix. Arrrrggggghhhh!
It was at this time that I learned that my tape backups were not the failsafe method I had counted on. One of the tapes in the most recent backup set was damaged: the software didn’t report that problem when backing up, only when I tried to restore and couldn’t. An earlier backup didn’t restore the whole operating system correctly, for reasons I never determined. Which is why I had to do a complete reinstall.
So now that it’s done, I want better (and more convenient) protection and to learn from my previous mistakes. Being understandably wary about trying to install Drive Image 7 again, I installed Drive Image 2002, which doesn’t require .NET. But it has to reboot to DOS to create an image of the operating system’s partition. It also requires that GoBack be shut off.
I hadn’t used GoBack before, but I want to use it now to help me avoid the possibility of a system crash like the one that Drive Image 7 caused a couple of weeks ago. In the summer I can manage to be without my computer for a week, but if that had happened at a different time of year, it could have been disastrous for my business.
But GoBack and Drive Image 2002 don’t play together well. You have to disable GoBack before you run Drive Image. And when you disable GoBack, you lose all of the history it has been saving for you, not just what happens while it’s disabled. Which sort of defeats the whole point. And I don’t think it would be simple to set up an unattended method for 1) turning off GoBack (which requires a reboot) 2) running Drive Image and then 3) turning GoBack on again.
So (finally!) here’s my question for all you computer experts: What are your recommendations? My goals, in a nutshell, are:
- Very reliable backup of data and full system state.
- Run unattended (overnight) every day.
- Store backups on existing hard disks that are about 75% empty (without backup files).
- Some form of active system protection (like GoBack) to lessen the impact of a catastrophic hardware or software failure.
I guess I’m looking mainly for suggestions for software that will accomplish these goals, but I will consider additional hardware, if necessary.
Thanks for your help!