Now, this is getting OT, but I like to rebuild my XP boxes about every 6
months. That's more than the 3 times in four years.....
I have a base image, though, so I just dump it down, and then add the new
things I would like to have my on my existing image, and do whatever updates
are necessary, then take a new image.
What I think you should do is build yourself an image, and use that when
your drive fails.
Install XP, install all your software.
Export your MSOffice registration registry key.
Do the updates, get it current.
Then, before you do anything else, take an image of it. This is a base image
with your software on it. Keep it until you get new hardware.
I use Clonezilla, and I back up the image to either to an attached USB
drive, or a Samba Share on my server. Takes about 20 minutes to do about 30G
on an 80G drive.
Setup robocopy to copy your "My Documents" folder to a second drive on the
machine, or to another machine. I backup to a samba server as part of a
logon script. I have a couple of machines that use a scheduled task. I do
use the /mir option, so if I hose something, it's my fault. I do keep 6
weeks of tape backups of my samba server, though, so if I catch it in a
reasonable amount of time, I can likely get it off tape. Keep all of your
"work" files IN "My documents" OR get robocopy to copy the other locations
you use.
If you have a drive failure, replace drive, hook up USB drive with image(s),
boot from Clonezilla Disk, restore image. the Same 30G image take about 10
minutes to dump back down. these are Dell GX520's. Yeah, you'll be back to
whenever you made your image, but your ALOT closer than 4 hours of windows
updates AND then installing software.
Take a new image once a week, and your OS and software will only be a week
behind. Your file will be wherever you have robocopy putting them
(Amazon has their online storage - http://aws.amazon.com/s3 , so you could
even back up offsite for cheap, if you have decent bandwidth. All this work
is pointless, if your place of business burns down. If you are running a
business, you NEED to get your data offsite.)
Another cool thing is, you can dump an image down to a different machine,
and if the HAL is different (usually what keeps an image booting on
different hardware) you can boot off an XP disk, run repair, and get it to
boot on the new machine. It would be best to have an XP disk with SP2
already on it. (or slipstream your own..)
Finally, buy server grade SATA disks. Yeah, I know it's not the same as
SCSI, but there are
-----Original Message-----
From: centos-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:centos-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Therese Trudeau
Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 10:03 AM
To: CentOS mailing list
Subject: RE: Recommendations for a "real RAID" 1 card on Centos box
>> Unfortunately I can't use software RAID1 because of this:
>>
>> http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2008-March/096063.html
>
> First, you should probably get your applications from a company that
> doesn't hate its customers... But aside from that, this restriction
> should only apply to the place where you install the app, not where
> you store your own work. Why don't you ghost-image (or use the free
> and very nice clonezilla-live) your system disk for a quick bare-metal
> restore, and put your own work on a separate raid-mirrored partition?
> And since you seem to be very paranoid about your disks, use some
> other backup mechanism like rsync to another location at some frequent
> intervals too.
Yeah I agree they are difficult to deal with sometimes. And expensive.
I agree the restriction should only apply to the place where I install the
application.
I told them that two years ago and they said that's the way their software
is designed, to prevent
installation if RAID 1 is detected, that's what the tech support guy told me
anyway.
They want to prevent someone from taking a mirrored drive and giving it to
someone else to use
on a different machine. They told me this two years ago not sure if they
have the same policy though -
but my version is about two years old.
I could clone just my data somehow on a seperate drive or backup (not the
applications and OS),
yet I also want to clone the entire OS and applications
that's where most of the time goes into as far as restoring a disk or buying
a new disk
is concerned. I'm paranoid because I've had 3 crashes in the past 4 years
and it's always a pain
delays my work for days. SATA drives are made cheap compared to server
grade SCSI's.
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