Creating perfect duplicates of his data allowed my cousin the peace of mind to know that even in a catastrophic failure, he could turn to the mirrored drive or critical files on it and be back to work in minutes.]]>Ever-increasing quantities of private and family data are kept on home computers. But until the last two years, there was a gap between the ever larger hard-disk drives that came with home computers and affordable methods to archive the gigabytes of documents, e-mail messages, home movies and MP3's. That gap has closed as consumer backup software has added features to write archives directly to external hard drives and higher-capacity DVD burners.
To back up the entire registry]]>
- Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup.
- Click Advanced Mode.
- Do one of the following:
- If you see the Backup or Restore Wizard as shown below, make sure that "Always start in wizard mode" is not checked, and then click Advanced Mode.
- If you see the Backup Utility window as shown below, go on to step 4.
- On the Welcome tab, click the Backup Wizard (Advanced) button.
- Click Next.
- Select Only back up the System State data, and click Next.
- Click the Browse button.
- If the Insert Disk warning message displays, click Cancel.
- In the left pane, click the Desktop button.
- Click Save.
- Click Next.
- Click Finish.
- When you see the message "The backup is complete" -- this could take a few minutes--click Close.
- Close the Backup Utility window.
The first step in developing a solid disaster recovery plan is to develop an idea of what constitutes an acceptable loss for your organization. First, consider the impact of losing data stored in your database. Would you be able to recover from the loss of an hour's worth of data? If you're managing a human resources database, chances are that you could deal with this situation by instructing your personnel to reenter data entered during that period. If you're running the database supporting a financial institution, the loss of an hour's data could bring the instant wrath of clients and industry regulators along with significant monetary losses. Protection against these types of losses is provided by backups of the database and use of transaction logging. We'll discuss these in further detail.]]>Second, consider the loss of access to the database itself. What would be the ultimate result if your end users were not able to access information for an extended period of time. The loss of access to our human resources database would likely result in frustration, but minimal loss to the business. On the other hand, if doctors at a hospital were unable to access test results and laboratory findings in a timely manner it could result in the loss of life or limb. If you find that these issues are a concern in your organization, you may want to consider the use of failover clustering to ensure the continuous availability of your database. This concept will be discussed in a future article.
Once you've determined the level of acceptable loss for your organization and received buy-in from the users you support and your management, it's time to begin developing a strategy to minimize the impact of a catastrophic event on your database. Our first step is to develop a comprehensive backup strategy. We'll discuss this in the next section of this article. Read on!
The Unix program dd is a disk copying util that you can use at the command line in order to make a disk image. It makes a bit-by-bit copy of the drive it's copying, caring nothing about filesystem type, files, or anything else. It's a great way to workaround the need for Norton Ghost.]]>Normally, in order to make a disk image, the disk you're copying from has to be able to spin up and talk -- in other words, it's OK to make a copy if the disk is healthy. But what happens when your disk is becoming a doorstop? As long as it continues to spin, even with physical damage on the drive, dd and Mac OS X will get you out of the fire.
We had a situation recently where a friend sent a disk to us that had hard physical errors on it. It would boot in Windows, but then it would hit one of these scratch marks and just die. We fired up dd, and it started OK, but stopped at the same physical error location -- complaining about a Hard Error.
So the workaround was to designate the dd mode as noerror -- which just slides over the hard stops, and to add the mode sync, which fills the image with nulls at that point. We did it on BSD Unix, but as long as you can get the hard drive attached to your Mac, the command is the same:
dd bs=512 if=/dev/rXX# of=/some_dir/foo.dmg conv=noerror,sync
First Advantage Corporation, a leading risk mitigation and business solutions provider, today announced the acquisition of Data Recovery Services, Inc., a national provider of business and consumer data recovery services, headquartered in Dallas. The addition of this new business line complements First Advantage's computer forensics operations by adding additional court-certified forensic experts, clean rooms and advanced engineering expertise to the company's existing data collection capabilities.]]>Founded in 1998, Data Recovery Services (DRS) recovers lost data from crashed, corrupted or damaged digital storage media or operating systems. With facilities in McLean, Va., Houston, and Dallas, DRS engineers use proprietary and customized diagnostic and recovery software and mobile clean rooms to facilitate the recoveries. DRS also offers computer forensics services and expert testimony to complement First Advantage CoreFacts group's national forensic practice. When combined, the group will service attorneys from a majority of the nation's largest law firms and many Fortune 500 companies.
AdRants: "While it's about five minutes longer than it needs to be, this video, created in January to promote LiveVault disk data back up, thankfully, features John Cleese who can make anything amusing. In the video, Cleese, taking on the persona of Institute for Backup Trauma Director Dr. Harold Twain Weck (ha, ha, get it?), explains why disk back up is better than tape back up. Particularly humorous is when Cleese goes off on the IT staff explaining that while it might be difficult explaining the need for dick back up to IT types whose offices are festooned with Dilbert comics and stacks of Diet Pepsi cans as if they were the latest Martha Stewart home decor, Cleese's Institute for Backup Trauma has the solution.""]]>
Much has been made in various blogs (syndicateONE, Jason Powell, Data Recovery Blog) about this being Microsoft’s foray into the enterprise backup space. I suppose there is some truth to that, although Windows has bundled a rudimentary backup product of one sort or another for quite some time. The reality is that this product does not compete directly with tape backup systems. They solve different problems.]]>A disk-based online backup system allows quick recovery time for files stored online, can be an easier proposition to present an end-user client for "administrator-less restores", and takes disk I/O load off the main fileservers when you do dump to tape (since the tape dump is performed on the mirrored backup copy, not the live fileserver). Disk-based systems do not address the issues of off-site storage for disaster recovery or long term archival (despite what vendors such as NetApp might want you to believe, you cannot just keep buying more and more disks forever).
Microsoft Corp. and Veritas Software Corp. appear headed for a showdown as they vie to woo smaller backup and recovery customers with self-service file recovery capabilities and integrated backup and replication technologies.]]>According to Veritas officials at Storage Networking World here last week, the Mountain View, Calif., company next quarter will introduce an offering that marries its backup and replication technologies to enable users to recover data from their desktop at any time.
The disclosure comes on the heels of Microsoft's announcement last week that its Microsoft System Center DPM (Data Protection Manager) disk-based backup product has moved to public beta. The product is set for release in the second half of this year, said Rakesh Narasimhan, general manager of the Enterprise Storage Division for the Redmond, Wash., company.
I have True Image 8 and Norton Ghost 9.... They both do fine job in cloning hard drives.. but I can not trust incremental backup and images... I tried about a half dozen time trying to restore files using both software.. absolutely NONE of them was successful... damaged images, files... etc.. I already lost serveral pictures and data... So.. I am looking for file to file backup type software that can incrementally copy files/folders to another networked computer's harddrive without compressing or imaging.... This way... I can always have two exact copies all the time...
It's still too early for a consensus, but SyncBackSE from 2BrightSparks seems to fit the bill. It offers:
One of the most important points for any computer user to remember is to always back up your data. As much as personal computing has advanced over the past 20 years, hard drives still fail. Hard Drives are an amazing piece of mechanical engineering, as then spin (sometimes continuously) at around 120 times per second (7200 rpm). These spinning platters are spinning at such high speeds that a small interference whilst in usage can damage the disk in a certain area. There are now fail safe mechanisms in place to prevent critical failures when there is a small amount of physical damage done to the drive, but accidents do happen.]]>When some areas of the disk fail, the hard drive is effectively useless. Cases like this usually require specialists to come and recover any data that might be left. If you have made routine backups of your important data, this would be a great inconvenience to restore and install all the applications and data once more, but still recoverable. If you were unfortunate enough not have any backups (or not recent ones), then you are in trouble. Data Recovery is a very time consuming process, and often quite expensive. Fortunately, there are some data recovery procedures that you can try before having to resort to professionals.
Lockergnome: "Here are PC World's favorite, free back-up programs - so now there's no excuse for not creating a safe copy of your data!"