More PC storage questions!

[Chris Wilson]

The more I try and learn about backups and safe storage the more questions I have.

 

Here's my latest. I have two identical SATA III 1 Gb hard drives, designated "D Drive" under Win 7 64 bit Pro. They are under an Intel software RAID 1 on a Gigabyte GA-Z97X-Gaming 3 motherboard. All appears well. I have the OS and my two mail apps on C: Drive which is an SSD drive. I use Second Copy to automatically back up both mail apps to the RAID 1 D drives each night. I also use Z-DBackup to make a system image of the C Drive once a week, which it creates on the RAID1 pair. The RAID 1 pair (D Drive) with the system image is backed up to LTO4 tape once a week.

 

What happens if on of the RAID 1 pair of SATA III drives fails? I guess the Intel software RAID flags a fault? I then have to work out which of the 2 drives is dead, and swap it out? What if an identical drive is no longer available? Will any 1 Gb or larger SATA III drive work, paired with the one remaining original working drive?? Does the RAID rebuild occur automagically? How long might one expect it to take?

 

With a truly unlucky chain of events, leaving the PC dead or missing, say from a power surge, theft or whatever, and I just have my tape, how do I go about getting the C Drive image from it to a new PC? Do I run a repair disc, load the tape deck drivers and the SCSI card drivers (it runs on SCSI on an Adaptec card), then will there be enough "stuff" on the new PC to load the Z-Dat software and restore from said tape? I guess I should be brave and "create" a fault and see if it all works *BEFORE* a real world failure...

 

As an aside, if the motherboard croaked and I had to replace it with a currently available one, can I be reassured another board would still read the software RAID 1 created hard drive pair?

 

Thanks for reading and for any replies.

[imi]

Don't need an identical HDD for RAID - as long as the size is the same / or more you are OK.

 

As for time to rebuild RAID - depends on the HDD and on the rebuild priority - for a 1TB drive i'd have expected it to take 4-5 hrs perhaps.

 

Backup to TAPE is a good idea - why not also backup to a portable HDD (USB) once a week / month and keep that in a remote location.

[Wez]

 

If the same drives are still available then I prefer to match them but a similar spec drive is fine.

[Chris Wilson]

OK, thanks guys, still unsure on how to go from a boot disk to seeing the tape drive and pulling the Windows image from it to a new hard drive...

 

 

Wez, I will price up the Bilstein stuff later for you, cheers.

[Scott]

You can load drivers during the boot. If it's an image that's on the tape then that would work fine using the recovery console. You need to have the drivers available though, I often use a pen-drive for such things. During the recovery it will ask what image you want to use, you then have an option of loading additional drivers. Once loaded, you will then see the tape drive available.

 

It may be an idea to go for a test run, but not actually go through with the restoration. That way you know that everything is in place when it's time to use it in anger.

[Wez]

As Scott said, to restore from the tape you would need a working setup with the tape drive, drivers and the backup software to restore to a new destination device.