Drives and backup

Kage

Golden Master
Messages
13,873
Hard drives are annoying things aren't they?...

WHICH DRIVE?

Well, in our machine, we have a 120GB drive partitioned into 4 for family members, followed by a 250GB drive for extra data, which was also acting as a backup for the 120GB drive by just dragging and dropping every now and then.

Anyhow, seems like the drive is going, or theres a bad power connector to the drive, as it keeps clicking and cutting out (Not good...) randomly.

So, today, my dad brought up his 500GB and backed up the 250GB (120GB had been used) which has sucessfully been done.

We now need more drives.

Now, I want to set up a RAID 1 array with two identical drives. Can this be done with IDE drives? Thats my first question.

My second, is, what is the best make of drive in terms of reliability in your eyes?
I want to buy from here:
http://www.microdirect.co.uk/productlister.aspx?GroupID=1040

I'm looking for about 320GB, so will need 2 of these.

Any help on what to buy will be very appreciated :)

RAID 1 QUESTION:

I'm guessing in Windows, you'd see only 1 drive, with a kind of hidden one?

DATA BACKUP QUESTION:

I don't know if a program exists that'll do this, but it'd be so much easier to back up stuff thats layered all around, where their may be duplicates, etc.

I need to find a program that'll look at all data on all drives/folders, or by choice, and basically tell me without doing anything to it, what files are identical, and where they are stored, so I can move them around, and delete the duplicates.

Any ideas?

Sorry for all the questions, but you all know me by now :p
 
Ok, where do we start :) Take a look here for a guide to setting it all up. IDE drives can be used for RAID.
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=830

Best brand in terms of reliability IMO is a raptor, they have a 5 yr guarantee and have a 1.2 million MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)

You have various data backup options, you could go for the windows backup utility which can be set to backup items periodically (cant complain when its free). Or you could use ghost to make images periodically etc.

You might want to check this free backup util out called EZBackitup (stand for easy backup)..

http://www.rdcomp.net/download.php

It just copies any designated files and folders to an alternative location like an external USB drive. The destination needs to have a drive letter as UNC paths are not supported. Once the files and folders have been backed up, it uses the files time stamps to decide whether to back them up again in the future, so if the file hasn't changed it won't keep backing it up.

It's the most simple solution that I have seen to date.

It won't back up the system state though. HTH :)
 
Thanks a lot Raffaz :)

Raptor though... ouch, expensive or what? :p
I'm looking for cheap but reliable drives that'll store A LOT of data for windows and files. This 120GB for example, is split into 4 separate partitions with 4 separate Windows XP installations.
Means basically, we can't mess each others up, and that suits me, because my brother and sister know nothing about how to protect a PC.

As long as I have RAID and have a drive I back up to every few months or so, I should be fine. I mean, the power supply could go, taking out both drives (But if that happens, I know I'm doomed for PC's), but I'll still have a back up somewhere.. :D

Thanks for the download also! Seems useful actually :D Would make it a lot easier to do backups onto a backup hard drive, backing up the RAID every once in a while.

THIS DRIVE OKAY?:

This IDE drive looks good from what I can see. Think its worth using for RAID?

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/ProductInfo.aspx?ProductID=14237&GroupID=1040

SATA:

I've always gone with IDE, which is why I've asked the question, because for some reason, I never really thought about getting SATA, since it didn't seem at the time to offer many speed improvements, and I heard about a lot of hassle installing the drives, etc. Should I really rethink this and give them a go?

DUPLICATES:

One last question from above. Is there a program that'll check for duplicate data, and tell me where each one is?
 
Well IMO, cheap and reliable in the same sentence dont go, but thats just me. I believe that you get what you pay for :)

That drive you have linked looks fine, although its not very fast mind, its only ATA100 (thats fine tho if thats all ya mobo supports)

Personally i would go with SATA, especially if ya mobo supports SATA2 because of the speed increase. Thats what i run on my computers and its not a problem setting RAID up with them. Its just a case of pressing F6 during OS install and installing the RAID drivers etc.

As for ya program that finds duplicate files try these
http://www.script-debugger.com/products/filescomparer/
http://www.atory.com/Dupe_Checker_PRO/
 
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