Best way to protect against disk failure

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I am sure this has been asked many times before but I am unclear on how best to accomplish this.

I want to backup my system drive (90 gig) so in case of a drive failure or corruption, it can be recreated in minutes on a new drive without reinstalling the OS and programs.

This program has many features and i am very confused about which one to use.

Assuming one HD drive in system.

Any help would be appreciated.

Mer, 10/27/2010 - 20:41
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The recommended method is to make an image of your drive. I would put the image on an external USB drive. You can restore the image to a new drive and it will be bootable. Also, only the "used" sectors are backed up and they will be compressed so the image will be smaller than the data on the HD. You can store as many images as will fit on your target media (the external USB) drive so you can roll-back to a previous state if necessary. Never, keep only one image of your system in case something goes wrong with it.

You should test that you can do a restore before you really have to. By far the best way is to put in a spare HD and do a restore. A spare drive is recommended in case it doesn't work which would leave you with unallocated space since one of the first thing TI does on a restore is to delete the partition being restored. The restore environment is Linux because Windows can't be running if the active partition, typically C, is being restored. Sometimes the Linux drivers aren't a good fit for some hardware so it is imperative you do a test restore.

If you don't have a spare drive or don't want to do the above, the next best method is to boot up the TI rescue CD and validate the archive. This will demonstrate that TI can read the archive and faithfully recreate the numerous checksums embedded in the archive when it was created. If only 1 checksum is wrong the archive will be declared corrupt.

Mer, 10/27/2010 - 22:13
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To make sure i understand this, the steps are:

1. make an image of the current OS drive (done in windows with TI?) - is this "disk management->clone disk?
2. restore that to a spare usb accessible drive (from within windows?)
3. make the usb spare the system drive (replace drive I cloned with the usb drive)
4. test to see if it can boot and that the spare drive works as the drive it replaced?

Gio, 10/28/2010 - 01:56
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Make an image of the current OS drive. It can be done in Windows or you can boot the TI rescue CD and make the image. While some people think imaging live in Windows is risky, experience indicates it is quite reliable.

It is not a clone. A lot of people refer to the imaging process as cloning but it is not a true clone and in particular, TI terminology dictates that a clone means to make a copy of one physical disk on another physical disk. It does all partitions on the disk. Some people do use a clone as a backup but you can only have one copy of the original disk on the target since it takes all the space making an identical copy. An image is the contents of the drive stored as a large file or files.

I don't have the current version of TI so I can't tell you exactly where the "make an image" command is.

You store the image archive file(s) on the USB drive. This is seen as a good place to store images because it can be taken off-line and stored securely. You could store and image of C on the same internal drive but in a different partition. The image of a partition cannot stored in the same partition because it will be deleted when the restore is done, in other words it would be useless. If you have a second internal drive you could store the image on it which would give some security. Even if the image of C is stored on say partition D on the same physical drive, it very likely would be inaccessible if the drive went bad.

To do a test restore you need to install a spare INTERNAL drive, connect the USB drive or have the drive containing the image accessible if it is on an internal drive, and boot up the rescue CD. Go through the restore wizard selecting the desired image and have it restored to the spare drive. This is exactly what you would do if the drive went bad and you have to replace it. In this case the new drive would be used in place of the spare.

Note that if you start a restore of the active partition, typically C, in Windows it will collect the data and then request a reboot. On reboot, the TI Linux rescue environment will be loaded to do the actual restore.

Then test that you can boot up the PC with the spare drive containing the restored OS and apps and see that it works.

Gio, 10/28/2010 - 02:38
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You want to to a disk mode backup, backup the entire disk (all partitions, etc.). The backup will be a file with a "tib" extension. to restore, boot the ati2011 boot cd and follow the screens to find the find the tib file and restore all the partitions to the target drive. As seekforever pointed out, you should do a test restore. If the hdisk gets wonky, you'll need to boot fromthe boot cd to do a restore so make one now if you haven't already and test it. Boot with it, go through the steps for a restore up to but not including the final Proceed. This will confirm that the drivers on the bootcd will let it see all your drives. IF you wait to do this until you need to actually restore and then find out there's a prob, that will be a pita. Better to find workarounds now if they are needed.

A full blown restore is even better but jsut going up to the final Proceed will give you virtually all the certainty you need.

Gio, 10/28/2010 - 11:22
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