Hard Drives

[harveymt]

Just a quick question about hard drives. Im getting a NAS to store my tunes on. Want to back them up as well in case the NAS goes. I know there is a RAID 1 array? Basically it gets stored in one place and backed up in another automatically. Is this possible with 2 drives? The first drive, the NAS one would be the primary drive with a second drive just plugged into computer by USB. How would I set it up that as I save a file to the NAS it automatically gets saved to the USB drive. Or will I have to do it manually?

Cheers

 

[knacker]

I would think you would have to do it manually as I don't think there is any software on the NAS that will allow you to set a further copy up. I am sure you will get a right answer from the helpful peeps on the website

 

[harveymt]

O and does anybody know if you can have two NAS drives on one network? I presume you can. I've got 300GB of lossless music with more to be added. If I add video into that I may need more than one hard drive.

 

[John Duncan]

Well I have two (though there may be a rearrangement shortly). D'you run windows or Mac?

 

[harveymt]

windows vista

 

[professorhat]

Hi there,

You can have as many NAS devices on your network as you like so long as they all have unique IP addresses and names.

As for your question on the RAID, you won't be able to achieve this with a NAS and a USB drive I'm afraid. With Windows Vista, RAID really needs to be setup in a hardware solution which requires a RAID controller. Are you using a laptop or a desktop? If a desktop, possibly this was included onboard with your machine, but more likely not (almost definitely not if it's a laptop). If it is, it would be an option within the BIOS of your machine (which can be looked at as the machine first boots, usually by pressing one of the F keys). However, there are good reasons not to use RAID - have a read of this article to see why. Make note the list of things RAID doesn't protect you against - it really isn't the backup solution that people think it is, just a protection against hard disk failure. What you really want is a proper backup solution which you run periodically to your USB disk. Windows has one built in which is under Control Panel and then System and Maintenance.

Apparently it is possible to set Windows Vista to create a software RAID for you, but (a) it seems to be fairly complicated from what I've read, (b) it causes large performance issues and (c) you would need two internal drives on the same IDE / SATA / SAS controller (depending on what type of connection your current internal hard disk uses) - a connection to a NAS / USB drive is just too slow to maintain RAID. So I can't really recommend it!

On the NAS front though, you will sometimes find these system do have inbuilt RAID controllers and this can be set during the initial setup of the NAS system itself (NB - you can't change it once you've started using the system though without taking everything off the drive to another drive and resetting the NAS system back up). Also bear in mind that RAID 1 will halve the available disk space i.e. if you buy a NAS with 1 TB and use RAID 1, you'll only have 500 GB of available space.

Let me know if you need any more info.

 

[John Duncan]

Well RAID 1 can conceptually be set up fairly easily, seeing as it's just disk mirroring - ie you keep the same data on more than one disk. Don't know about Vista's capabilities in this regard, but there are plenty of cheap backup solutions available - acronis seems to get mentioned a lot.

 

[professorhat]

Well, a true RAID 1 solution is where changes are made at the same instant on both disks, thus ensuring information is constantly up to date on both - hence the need for the fast connection to both drives. A hardware based system using a proper dedicated RAID controller is generally the best option since it won't affect the performance on the system, however, software versions are available and Windows does have the ability built in, but as I say, you would need two internal hard disks to set this up and, from what I've read only you understand, it doesn't seem to be the simplest thing in the world any more, whereas in Windows XP, it wasn't too difficult (I haven't used Vista so can't confirm this though). Really, RAID 1 is designed to ensure your system doesn't fail because of a disk failure, which is why it's used heavily in the business world on servers where downtime costs lots of money. At home, this isn't really so much of an issue. Being unable to access your home machine for a few days until you can restore the backup on to a new disk is a pain, but is not generally going to cost you anything.

For backup solutions, I agree Acronis is a good one, as it effectively takes an image of your machine, so restoring to a new hard disk in case of failure makes it very easy to get back up and running just as you were very quickly. However, if we're talking about backing up lossless music and video files, a simple copy and paste from the NAS to the USB drive will do the job.

 

[harveymt]

Think I'll leave the RAID stuff alone.

Is there much difference between Windows back-up and an actual program like Acronis? In the event of a computer failure I presume I'll still have to re-install everything, it won't put all the programs back installed and ready to go? Or will it? If I just cut and paste i could end up missing stuff and end up having to download a load of stuff again.

Just while I have you guys here. My mate is going down this route too. He's in the process of getting a Samsung B650 which is DLNA cert. With a DLNA-cert NAS could he stream tunes to his TV? Would the TV have a media server installed on it that will play his music or does he need iTunes running on something separate?

 

[Alec]

harveymt:

Is there much difference between Windows back-up and an actual program like Acronis? In the event of a computer failure I presume I'll still have to re-install everything, it won't put all the programs back installed and ready to go? Or will it?

I'll second that.

Were you refering to xp with that backup facility proff, as i cant find it?

 

[Anonymous]

how about using something like pathsync, i think you can set it to automatically scan for changes on a scheduled basis and then you can just click a button and it will copy all new files over.

 

[professorhat]

harveymt:Is there much difference between Windows back-up and an actual program like Acronis? In the event of a computer failure I presume I'll still have to re-install everything, it won't put all the programs back installed and ready to go? Or will it? If I just cut and paste i could end up missing stuff and end up having to download a load of stuff again.

Acronis TrueImage is the one I use (although the one linked is a new version to what I have) - it'll actually image the hard disk (say to a USB drive) and allow you to create a boot disk so that, if you need to, you can boot from the boot disk and then re-image the machine from the backup. In this way, Windows, and all your programs will be back exactly as they were from the last backup, so there's no need to reinstall everything again.

al7478:Were you refering to xp with that backup facility proff, as i cant find it?

In XP, the Windows backup program is on Start > Accessories > System Tools > Backup. However, that isn't an imaging backup program like the Acronis one, so although it will backup your data, if you needed to recover, you would need to reinstall Windows, then all the programs and then restore the data from the backup. However, it is free!

harveymt:Just while I have you guys here. My mate is going down this route too. He's in the process of getting a Samsung B650 which is DLNA cert. With a DLNA-cert NAS could he stream tunes to his TV? Would the TV have a media server installed on it that will play his music or does he need iTunes running on something separate?

Looking at the Samsung B650 series, it has something called Samsung's Media 2.0 suite so he should be able to access any music he has on a NAS through this assuming it's in a supported format (from what I can see in the manual, it only supports MP3).

 

[Alec]

in all programmes? weirdly, i cant see it. i just get character map, disk cleanup, defrag, files and settings transfer, IE, scheduled tasks, system info, system restore.

However, it sounds like a faff so im just going to try use acronis. i had it a while back, had difficulty moving round it with my mouse and keyboard for some reason, put it on the back-burner, and never got back to it.

Still, seems a good prog in theory espcially as you can mount images and take individual things from them.

EDIT - sorry Proff, could you just clarify for me the difference between an image and a clone and when you would use them? I thought i understood, but some patronising so and sos elsewhere thought otherwise, so im doubting myself now...

See, far as i can tell, an image is that versatile that it can be used even if you replace the hdd cant it? So im not sure where a clone comes in...if you had a whole new machine, pesumably neither would be useful...

 

[professorhat]

As far as I'm aware, in practical terms imaging software and cloning software are identical, but I admit backup software isn't my speciality. If I think about, strictly, cloning software would only allow you to create a replica of your current drive to another drive, whereas an image can be taken and as you say, mounted and explored so that only files can be restored, as well as allowing you to completely reimage a new disk if your old one fails so that it was exactly the same as the moment you took the image. However, in my experience, you don't really get software which only clones nowadays - one bit of software will allow you to do both (like Acronis does), so the terms tend to be interchangeable.

As for the Windows backup, if you can't find it on the Start menu, just go to Start > Run and then type "ntbackup" in the Open box and click OK and this should load it up.

 

[Alec]

Thankyou. see, i was thinking of keeping a clone too. they include even the empty sectors of a disk so are a bit for bit copy in full size, as opposed to a compressed image containing, AFAIK, only the parts of the hdd there is something on. Forgive me if im preaching to the choir. Anyhoo, i thought about it but cant quite see the point if an image is just as good for a new hdd.

 

[professorhat]

Nope, no point at all that I can think of.

 

[harveymt]

Excellent stuff. Many thanks.