Backup success story

[stevech]

Takes a lot of time to make sure the daily incremental and weekly full image backups work, going across the LAN, for my Sage server.

So today the C drive in the server fails. Bearings failed. Seems like that's always what happens, no matter the claimed warranty.

Replaced drive. Used Acronis bootable CD to partition/format. Then used their bootable CD to restore the backed up drive image saved on a server in the garage. 20 minutes later - wa-la! Back to as we were.

First time I've actually had to do this. Beats the heck of reinstall win XP and all the drivers.

Video is on two other drives.

now-- better start thinking about that RAID-1 for video.

[erik]

Originally Posted by stevech

now-- better start thinking about that RAID-1 for video.

Do you plan for SW or HW RAID?
I tried SW raid and under controlled conditions (pulling out a disk) it worked but there is some bad experience out there.
Disadvantage of RAID1 is the slower write
Why don't you go for nightly (or early morning) copy to a backup disk?
Many good free back programs' (Cobian backup)

[FidgetyRat]

I was considering a setup where I use my current Raid0 disks for performance sake, and copy a backup of the drive changes to a slower but much larger IDE disk nightly.

My ideal setup is to have the IDE disk be the Music, system & Backup drive & the SATA Raid0 array be just for recordings. ... Come to think of it I think I'll get right on this...

[willgill]

I'll echo the accolades of Acronis True Image. I've bought every version from 7 through 10. It's money well spent. I haven't reloaded Windows from scratch in years. It just seems dumb.

It seems like a dedicated RAID 5 NAS box is the way to go. I've geared up my home network to Gigabit and 802.11 pre-N. I was ready to go out and get the NAS box until I ran into major dental issues which will run $9k. Oh well, will have to wait a bit on the NAS.

[jbarr]

I've been pushing Acronis True Image for a long time, and for somthing like SageTV, I think it's an affordable, and essential solution to a problem that will likely hit most people at some point. It's so satisfying having a restored, working system up and running in mere minutes! Great job!

[lovingHDTV]

I can say this would have helped me over the last couple days. I have backups for all my machines, but my Sage Client machine. As the client box was acting wierd I decided to rebuild it.

After 2 days for trying to figure out which release of the drivers worked with the 6200 card I have in it, I would have loved to just re-image it.

I did finally figure out that the nforce 84.21 version are the best drivers for my 6200

I guess I'll go buy a copy of True Image and use it on the client. I use Restrospect Pro. for all my other computers.

[erik]

You can get acronis true image version 7 for free from their web site.
It works very well.

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by erik

You can get acronis true image version 7 for free from their web site.
It works very well.

And if you want to get the latest version, get it as a download from newegg.com for only $31.90 instead of $49.99


Dirk

[jbarr]

Originally Posted by erik

You can get acronis true image version 7 for free from their web site.

Link?

[erik]

http://www.acronis.com/mag/vnu-ati7
YOu receive a key and then you have to register your new product to get to the download area

[stevech]

Help!
After replacing the C drive, Sage put a lot of old recordings into the IMPORTED VIDEOS folder. These recordings were made days or weeks prior to the C backup of wiz.bin. Drives D and E are my videos.

The wiz.bin that I got after the disk restore was a full backup image made 8 hours prior to the disk failure. That backup was made while Sage was running so the wiz.bin database was open.

Should I have used wiz.bak?

Does Sage "flush" out the database so that wiz.bin should have been up to date?

The only other thing I might try is to see if the recordings now in the imported videos folder are *all* on D or E.

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by stevech

Help!
After replacing the C drive, Sage put a lot of old recordings into the IMPORTED VIDEOS folder. These recordings were made days or weeks prior to the C backup of wiz.bin. Drives D and E are my videos.

The wiz.bin that I got after the disk restore was a full backup image made 8 hours prior to the disk failure. That backup was made while Sage was running so the wiz.bin database was open.

Should I have used wiz.bak?

Does Sage "flush" out the database so that wiz.bin should have been up to date?

The only other thing I might try is to see if the recordings now in the imported videos folder are *all* on D or E.

Shut Sage down completely and copy the backup of wiz.bin over again then start it up. It might get more/all the second time. I actually had that happen on a restore I did once - but it may not be the usual thing to happen.

If not but another airing for the show exists in the database and you can wait a month my VideoEdit plugin will be able to associate the Imported Video back to the airing of your choice.

BobP.

[davephan]

Thats great news to hear of a successful recovery. Too many people never bother to backup their systems, and have to rebuild them from scratch.

I use Ghost 9.0 and Ghost 10.0. I thought about trying Acronis, but I never tested it. I did hear an eariler version of Acronis had a bug where the recovery process would fail -- but that was quite awhile ago, and they fixed that bug. Eariler versions of Ghost, version 6 and lower had intermittant recovery problems.

I keep some of my images backed up on a separate USB hard drive. I also have some image sets backed up on DVDs and stored offsite.

The imaging also comes in handy when you want to test new software, including new versions of SageTV, and want the option to quickly and easily roll back your system.

The price of imaging software is cheap compared to the hours of wasted time rebuilding a system from scratch.


Dave

[stevech]

As the computer nerd, I'm happy to get the C drive going easily.
The WAF is bad - due to the database screwup.
I really need to get those recordings out of IMPORTED, somehow, and back where they were.

[stevech]

I got back to near normal, as follows...

re why wiz.bin is fouled up and has many files in the IMPORTED directory now ... Among these files apparently not known to wiz.bin are some in D and some in E. All sorts of dates.

First I tried using a one day older wiz.bin (shut down sage, replace wiz.bin, restart sage). No help. Still lots of orphaned files in the IMPORTS.

I then went back a day earlier. And I moved both wiz.bin and wiz.bak for that earlier day. Better! Now most of the files are now back in the RECORDINGS.

I don't know why. Maybe you have to fall back using *both* wiz.bin and wiz.bak. I had been replacing wiz.bin and not the .bak.

---
So now my backup strategy is keeping the all the wiz.bin/bak and sage.properties (using "SecondCopy"), in addition to full/incremental drive imaging.

Time to decide how to get low cost RAID-1 hardware. Burning DVDs is too time consuming (has to be done with a different/faster PC than the one running Sage).

Hope this helps someone else.

[erik]

If you find cheap but working HW for RAID1 let us know.

[stevech]

seems like $75 EIDE or SATA disk controllers are commonplace, claiming RAID-1 capability. Challenge is to sort out which do so in hardware rather than in Window$ XP. I've read that the software implementations are ill-advised for reasons of speed.

I plan to merely put a controller card and 2 drives in an existing server PC I have that runs 24/7. Might even use drives I have on-hand. I understand that the hardware RAID-1 makes this transparent to XP Pro.

I don't think I want Linux based NAS - too slow with SMB, I've read. Not that I want more Gates' dependencies at all.

[stevech]

I'm happy with "Second Copy" - $30 great software. Put it on some PC in your LAN. Configure it with several easy to setup backup tasks to copy files from/to any PC/PC on the LAN. Backup configurations can be

What folders and/or what individual files
When file/folder changes
On a time schedule (very flexible choices)
etc
Optionally, keep last n versions of the file/folder

These choices are done with a really simple to use wizard.

I use these to backup my family photos, Sage Wiz files, the entire desktop folder on my office pc, and so on, to one of several folders on drives on my LAN.
I also do weekly drive images and daily drive image incremental, at 2AM, using TruImage.

(I have no financial interest in this product)

Here's a screen grab of the backups for Wiz. I have it set for last 7 versions. Call me paranoid.

[willgill]

Originally Posted by stevech

I'm happy with "Second Copy" - $30 great software. Put it on some PC in your LAN. Configure it with several easy to setup backup tasks to copy files from/to any PC/PC on the LAN. Backup configurations can be

What folders and/or what individual files
When file/folder changes
On a time schedule (very flexible choices)
etc
Optionally, keep last n versions of the file/folder

Stevech, checkout the version 10 of Acronis True Image. It does traditional backups as you've described. See my attachment of my necessary SageTV file backups.

[FidgetyRat]

Seems alot of you use third party backup utilities. Any reason not to use the built-in backup scheduler of XP?

If something is definitely better out there i'll switch.