Any tip for backup: rotate between two USB drives?
Just wondering if someone can recommend a method for nightly image backups to two separate USB drives? I plan to rotate the two drives on a weekly basis, only one connected at a time...
My best guess:
create two nightly backup jobs -- one for each drive.
On any give night, one job will fail, the other will work, depending on which drive is connected.
Or should I use a more clever strategy?
Have a look at Grover's True Image Guides, link on the left of this page under Useful Links, item3A - 3D Chain2Gen and Drive Notify
Ken,
As como has stated, Chain2Gen would be an asset.
This could easily be achieved using Chain2Gen (C2G) which is a helper program for TrueImageHome (TIH). C2G was written by forum contributor MVP Oracledba
TrueImage runs the tasks which does the scheduling and creates the backups, whereas, C2G provides the controls on when the full backup should be created. or how many to be retained. C2G offers many choices. C2G stores its contents in folders--one backup set per folder.
What are you plans for the type of backups. Are you planning one full and 6 inc or dif backups? or a full backup each night?
Basically, you can do this with one task. Assign drive letter X to each external drive.
There are several ways to configure your task but it depends upon the types of backup being contemplated.
Are you planning on have the external to be attached during the entire week or are you going to attach the exteranl just prior to its use?
Grover and Como:
Thank you very much for the responses and pointing me in the right direction. Very much appreciated.
I plan on reading up on your suggestions and tips. All I can say is that I was thinking of having two copies of backups, rotated for off site storage. Swapped once a week. Backups nightly. Incase or catastrophic failure: reinstall from the latest image I have available. Because the hard-drive (60GB) on the "server" is so darn small, I see no problem in doing only full jobs.
So yes, one drive stays connected for the whole week. The only critical data that changes *daily* is Quickbooks which I send off-site nightly, using dropbox.com. So if the local attached backup disk "disappears" together with the server... in some unforeseen event - I can still recover.
"Server" in the case is only headless XP machine that is hosting Quickbooks data and is a simple file/print server in a 5 user Workgroup network.
Again, thank you very much.
I am gathering together some notes but a couple more questions?
1. The scheduled time you are going to have the backup begin.
2. Will the computer shutdown after backup completion?
3. For what period of time to you plan on retaining the backups before deletion?
My guess for backup size will be about 30-35GB each or about 210-245 GB needed for each week of storage. A 500GB drive would only store about 2 weeks of backups daily full backups on a 60GB of used space. TWo larger drives would be a better preference.