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Partition strategies, backup plan.

I have 4 160 GB SATA drives and a Raid controller that does Raid 1, 0, and soft 5. I also have a 5 pack of DVD+RW's that I am dedicating to backups. My original plan was to have one drive with a partition of 20GB where windows would sit, and the other 3 drives used for soft raid-5. But then I would have 140GB of just blah space on my primary drive. I never made it a habit of backing up so I have no idea what the best method is of doing it is. I have Norton Ghost 9 and a boot disk that can boots up in dos that can burn the img on DVD's. I guess the question is, what would you do? Also is it bad to have a 400+GB partition?

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r-k

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nobus

For the backup to be automated, you can use a script, or a program.
One i like very much is BackupExpress, but it is not free. It gives the option to make the backup in zip format, which you can read on all systems (not like many other programs, which have their own format, that can be read only with the use of the original soft)
another FREE backup program is : cobian backup from : http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/prog.htm

Cheech151337

ASKER

If I were to use ghost to make a copy of my primary drive to my 3 drive soft raid 5 array, is there any downside to doing it while windows is running? (windows has to be to access the soft raid) I don't care as much about my files as I do having a 100% image to fall back on when I do something stupid and the computer wont boot anymore. Now that I think of it.. If my computer did stop booting, I wouldn't be able to access my raid-5 array! I do have a 160GB IDE drive, that would bring my total drives to 5 and I am cramped on space allready... I guess I can make it work, so back to the question, is there any disadvantage of backing up for MY purposes while windows is running, or should I just not take the chance and do it with a boot disk?

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Watzman

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r-k

Re. you question about Ghost:

I assume you will need to boot into a special "DOS mode" for Ghost to be able to create an exact image. I don't think this can be done while Windows is running. It may be possible to start Ghost in WIndows, but then it should prompt you to boot again to start the image copy process.

Also see the following link for what Ghost can and cannot do in some cases:

http://service1.symantec.com/support/ghost.nsf/docid/2000062209523525

If you do use Ghost be sure to test the backup volume you create. It's a bad feeling when you try it the first time when you really need it and turns out something went wrong :(

Also agree with Watzman that DVDRW should not be used for any long-term backup of anything remotely important.

Watzman

Previously, these programs had to reboot to DOS (DR DOS, in most cases) to do the backup, or at least the backup of the running windows partition, because the registry and temp files and running programs are constantly writing to the disk and changing things. Then PowerQuest developed technology for Drive Image enabling it to backup the running Windows partition, registry, temp files and all, without shutting it down and while it was still in use (I have no idea what they are doing or how). This was a sufficient incentive for Symantec to buy out Powerquest, so Symantec now owns (and, for the moment is still marketing) both Drive Image and Ghost. They took the Drive Image technology and incorporated it into Ghost version 9, so now the latest versions of both Ghost and Drive Image can make the backup without going into a DOS mode.