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In a further attempt to reduce power, I'm contemplating ditching my RAID1, putting it onto my RAID5, and doing an automated daily/weekly backup to a different PC entirely. Anyone do that? What tool do you use for that automation?
the other thought is to get a 2-bay enclosure NAS, sticking the drives in there. I could then downgrade the PC to an Intel Little Valley, 20W pc. Not sure how much power i'd save, though.
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There is a product called drivexml that is free for private use. IT can image the whole drive without needing to shutdown the OS.
If you want a straight file copy of non-os files and directories then just write a batch file to do the job and use a scheduled task.
Mick
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Anything though that doesn't shut down the OS isn't guaranteed to be able to restore back to a coherent system, since it can always hit a given set of files as the are being updated, and some of them have been and some haven't.
Dean Roddey
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That is not true at all. Online backup have been done for years on servers - where the guarantee is critical.
Image creation uses Microsoft's Volume Shadow Services (VSS), allowing you to create safe "hot images" even from drives currently in use.
Norton Ghost is an example of a pay version of this type of software.
Mick
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If you have a process that continuously copies any changes to another system as soon as they are made, then that could work, but it still can't be 100% guaranteed. Definitely no single pass system could ever guarantee that it's going to get a coherent image, because it cannot know that file A was just updated and file B is about to updated with information that references the info just written to file A. It would require reading the minds of the programs involved and knowing what they are going to do at some future time and to know that they always left files in a completely coherent state at all times, which isn't always the case.
Even with a constant copying scheme, if the system failed, it could happen while a file is being updated but not completed, or after file A had been shadow copied but file B that references it hasn't, etc..., it would seem to me.
Dean Roddey
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