Hard Drive Failure!
One of my dual 300GB hard drives failed last night. The dual-drive configuration is set up so the primary drive contains everything important and the secondary drive is a backup.
To back up my files, I use a STOMP Backup MyPC. I don’t back up everything, just all of my critical files like my music library, photo library, and files I authored or created in Photoshop / Illustrator.
Good thing for me the backup drive failed. If the primary failed, my weekend would be more or less miserable as I’d have to re-install Windows before being able to restore the backup.
So, I want to come up with a new backup strategy that will overcome these limitations. The goal of this new strategy is to always have working copy of my primary drive for instant no-hassle restoration. This can be achieved with Norton Ghost, which I have.
However, Norton Ghost reboots into a modified version of DOS so it’s not something I can automate on a nightly or weekly basis.
The solution I’ve devised is a combination of nightly STOMP backups combined with monthly Ghost image-taking. Every month I’ll reboot my machine and “ghost” my primary drive. This creates an exact duplicate that serves as my “no-hassle” restoration. Then, each night my drive will be backed up by STOMP.
In the event of a primary drive failure, I simply remove the bad drive and replace it with the ghost version. Once Windows restarts, I restore the ghosted image (which will be up to a month old) with last night’s backup. Finally, I’ll order a new 300GB drive to serve as the new ghost backup.
Since my machine only supports two drives, I ordered an external SATA enclosure. The ghost drive will sit in this enclosure.
The total equipment charge of my order was $295 (2x300GB drives + enclosure) and I ordered from newegg.com. While this may seem a bit pricey, in the event of a failure and being faced with either losing all of my data and/or spending the weekend restoring my drive, I’d pay just about anything.