PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

I always have problems w/ re instal;ls and having to re do many aspects of my rig.

Instead of just doing my hard drives, would just solve my PROBLEMS ?


http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=418

I've cloned my Systems with Norton Ghost or Acronis (which I like the best) sometimes, and always worked good.
Never tried w/ my DAW but I don't see any reason why it should'nt work. They just make an image of your current system and copy it exactly on another disk... no magical hidden processes.

They also do incremental backups, it means you can update your image with your latest changes without restarting the whole process.

I find it very comfortable.

P.S. never tried w/ my DAW since I'm still looking for a really stable system!!!

but mind you have to use identical hardware for the cloned machine...

mmmh... I believe this works on the same machine with two disks... on another machine with identical hardware you can simply put the original hd, right?

yes you can of course do a clone to a second disk. but you can not put the cloned disk in a completely different computer, hardware wise... so i recommend to use exactly the same... ok, when the graphic card differs, you only have to install the right driver of course...

Off course... I thought he was talking about backing up a clean and fully functional install on a machine for quick restore in case of problems.
That's what i did wit my office and internet desktop before Linux, as my xp fully loaded with fws and antiviruses had faults every 6 or 7 months (that's what happens when too much people put too much hands on the same machine )

yep, you're right, must have overlooked that

If you are talking about imaging your disks (snapshot) for quick and easy restore and you are not running raid, then there is a really good utilty here :-
http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm
It's very easy to use and it's free!

Acronis works very well.

I have had terrible experiences with Norton Ghost... Sometimes it does its job, but it's left me hanging on many occasions - I reccomend you make an experience first, like trying to restore a secondary partition, or something that is already backed up and safe, just to see if it really works, or if your precious system snap will not turn into a useless giant folder on your hard drive.

First time I hear about Acronis, but I will give it a look. Everytime I have to reinstall the OS, I also have to enter serial numbers, go to the web to reauthorize a bunch of programs, etc, etc... That's soooo boooooring, I delay every reinstalation for as long as I can.

My reasoning for this is my next upgrade is my concern.

The mobo has 6 SATA ports, my RAID cage can house 4. I will need only 3. It looks like I can connect all 6 HDD's at once right after the upgrade, and clone the important HDD's.

Once my upgrade is complete, I was hoping to have 3 extra HDD's to make a copy of the important 3 HDD's.

One is the O.S. + applications. The second would be the sample content for Giga, the third being the Gigastudio IR collection.

I'm hoping that these spares could be hot swapped during a performance into the SATA RAID cage if a failure were to occur.

The down time during a RAID rebuild is unacceptable, this should according to what I've read, and researched happen w/o having to boot up again.

The RAM will have all the necessary footprints of the O.S. and Gigastudio, just no more streaming of audio until the spare could be swapped.


You can't always believe what you read, but this sounds worth looking into, and Acronis has already been considered.


Thanks 4 The Replies,

sure, but even a usb connection can be used for cloning. you won't be able to clone more than one drive at a time, so even the bays that you already have could be used for this task, no need to make it harder and no need for raid. there is no such thing as a sure thing. there is no absolute assurance against data loss no matter what the format. backups can definitely be done, though...

Cloning can be done in lots of differnt ways! There are alot of programs to clone stuff to other pc's with differnt hardware. I think Acronis and Symantec System Restore are two examples.

If you simply do a one-to-one clone of your system, you can boot it in safe mode and it should start searching/installing the new/changed hardware.

What I want to try is to use iSCSI in my studio, and see how that goes. Can do recording to local disks in the machines, and keep all my files on the iSCSI machine The fun thing is with decent iSCSI targets is that you can do snapshots! Almost instant backups. Of course you are limited to network transferrates... so more then 80MB a second should not be expected!

But thats more than enough for most things. You could even boot your machines from a remote iscsi storage device! Thats so awesome. If you have backup hardware, you only need to boot it and it will have the exact same setup. Or just transfer your cards to your backup machine which has the same Mobo and you are off!! Orrrrrr boot the backup machine in single user mode, let windows fix the drivers, and start abusing Scope! Much to expensive a setup for me! I will start with a free iSCSI target for storage, and continue from there.....

garyb wrote:Acronis works very well.

+1

this is the only solution that not requires a reboot when you make the image
Very stable and advanced software!

-3