Netbook backup strategy needed
I have an Acer Aspire One netbook. It does not have a CD drive.
I think this changes everything about backup since a "recovery" cd seems to be needed.
My computer:
3 USB 2.0 ports
Windows XP home edition
1 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor
1.5 GB RAM
160 GB 5400 rpm SATA drive with 8 MB cache in one single partition
The functional requirements of my backup plan:
1) No CDs needed
2) Weekly backups in less than 8 hours
3) Daily backups in less than 1 hour.
4) Full recovery after a hard drive crash in less than 1 hour to the state of the most recent backup
5) Only one extra hard drive needed. I travel very light and don't want to have to carry with me the hard drive containing the backup as well as a separate replacement hard drive.
After buying Acronis TrueImage Home 2010, I saw that there is a "Netbook" version out but I read the comparison and that version only seems to be missing features. I don't see how it gets you around the lack of an optical drive.
I'd really just like to have it work as RAID hard drives work with the exception that since I can't put two hard drives inside my little computer, I would periodically connect one in an enclosure by USB and update it from the internal one. Then after a crash, I just unscrew the bad one, screw in the good one and be done.
From the documentation, "clone" seems to be the word used to refer to what I want but I have a couple problems with that:
1) I read that you should install the destination drive and put the source drive in an external enclosure. First, I can't be doing transplant surgery on my computer every time I want to do a backup, and second, I don't know how I'd be able to even start Windows with the blank hard drive in the computer.
2) I don't know if cloning is going to take too long to do every day.
3) I don't know whether the cloning process is verified by TI. I don't want to lose a good clone by overwriting it with a bad clone.
4) I don't know if overwriting clones daily produces excessive wear and tear on the devices.
Perhaps instead I want an "image" or "full backup with system state, etc" or perhaps some combination. I'm pretty ignorant about backup so this all seems very confusing to me when all I really want is RAID functionality with an external drive that's updated periodically instead of an internal one that's updated constantly.
Thanks for reading all this and for any ideas. It's long but I tried not to make it any longer than necessary.
Thanks for the speedy response. If I do that, I will need to carry with me:
1) a USB flash drive,
2) an external hard drive containing the backups and
3) a replacement hard drive.
and I will need to count on my machine booting up from a flash drive and a restore process working perfectly.
I'd like to avoid that if possible. I travel by backpack. So space is tight. Is there any other way? I realize that installing the clone drive after a crash will mean not being able to do backups until I find a new one to take over as clone, but that's okay if I can avoid having to always carry a spare and counting on a restore process working perfectly.
While I'm asking questions... Is it possible (with any backup software) to update a clone incrementally to save time? Is there such thing as a bootable image and how does it differ from a clone?
The external portable drives are as small as a pack of cards and come in sizes as large as 500Gb. If that is not big enough then you're out of luck. Maybe the smaller solid state drives will be better but are infinitely more expensive.
You cannot update a clone incrementally ... you have to make a completely new clone.
Not sure about bootable Images .... seems like I saw reference to such somewhere but didn't pay any attention to it.
Does anyone know how long it would take TrueImage to create a clone of a 160 GB hard drive over USB?
Are there any potential drawbacks of using daily cloning as the backup strategy?
I'm still a little puzzled. I don't need a clone to have all of its ones and zeroes in exactly the same sectors, but it seems to me that if a system can identify incremental changes needed, it should be able to just impose those changes on a logically-formerly-identical backup hard drive in an enclosure at backup time rather than saving them in a .tib file and requiring a restore process, a rescue CD or flash drive that is easily lost and needs to be updated and a replacement hard drive that may not be available when you need it - for example when the stores are closed or you're traveling.
The time it takes would depend on the amount of data being transferred. Figure 1-1.5GB/sec. for an estimate.
Doing daily cloning would mean that you only have a backup hard drive. You will not have a backup in the sense of being able to recover older files.
Personally, I think I would go with image backups (using a weekly Full and then daily Incrementals).
I just came across another reason why I can't use the "rescue media" solution. According to the Acronis help documentation, "The recommended minimum screen resolution is 1152 x 864." My little computer only has 1024 x 600 pixels.
I know backup systems can identify what's changed on my hard drive since the last backup and I know they can impose the changes of an incremental backup onto a replacement hard drive during their restore processes. So they must be able to do those two things together at backup time and eliminate the restore process entirely.
I don't want a disk image wrapped in a proprietary-format file that requires a restoration process before I can use it. I just want a simple incremental backup system that maintains a usable-as-is logically exact duplicate of my hard drive without requiring the whole thing to be copied every time. I know it's possible and I know it makes a ton of sense but I just haven't found it.
The Netbook edition of TI is supposed to be able to handle the resolution used by those computers.
TI can't do incremental cloning. If you're insisting on using that type of backup, you'll need to look elsewhere. As already stated, these types of backups do not allow going back in time. If your drive/system becomes corrupted on Monday and you don't find it out until Wednesday, the "backup" clone is already corrupted.
I don't want a way to save all the versions of all my old files. I just want protection against my hard drive crashing. If I mess up a file on my active hard drive, I will have one copy of it on the backup drive, but that has never happened. If I'm about to do something risky, I just make a copy of it first.
Darn, looks like I wasted $50. I hate when I do that. Thanks guys for all your help.