Hi all! I’ve been trialling Second Copy by Centered Systems for a month and am in the process of plonking down the $$ for two copies of the program covering both my and my wife’s laptops.
I was wondering if any other Drobo’ers have used this program to “backup” to their Drobo appliance.
I’m running a home network: two Win 7 laptops and a Drobo FS.
I find most backup software more complicated than needed. In my experience when disaster strikes it’s most often the case that attempts to re-install some fancy “disk image” will come to nought because the OS of the new computer does not match that of the crashed and broken old one – or some such.
During the 30 day trial period I’ve been adjusting which directories and files were being “copied” to the Drobo FS every night. Microsoft has made the Windows directory structure so “fuzzy” (Libraries?!) it’s sometimes tough to know exactly where some files reside.
I’ll welcome any discussion – Second Copy or just plain backup related.
The native Windows 7 drive image backup is pretty powerful. From what I understand it even clones the information on the drive that’s used for most if not all software activations, and can be restored to a larger drive as well.
That said, it’s often much easier to just get the file(s) you need immediately, without having to restore an entire drive, so there’s use in both drive and file-based backup.
hi Jim, heres some more info from me in case useful:
i use syncback to effectively mirror my v1 into the v2 drobo (minus a few system folders etc), (both are local)
and then i use mozy online feature to backup special folders as an extra.
(i still keep some copies of really important stuff on my main drive, but most is just on the drobos)
(future plan is to have a 3rd drobo offsite but that is still in the works)
but i guess a good thing to do (especially if data is important) is to have multiple copies of it maybe similar to above, better if also in another location as well, plus to also use a hard drive image with something like Acronis, on your main computer o/s system (eg if windows), so that in case of a drive failure you use that image to extract it onto another hard drive (ideally the same make and model as before) so that you can be good to go with minimum fuss (in theory)
i read recently that there is an imaging program (possible some variant of acronis?) which can recover a system onto any other drive, regardless of hardware or even virtual o/s’s or something that sounded too good to be true lol - if its true, and proven (at least in some scenarios) then that;s probably the better way to go, because recently one of my old win98 machines packed up and its really hard to find similar hardware and cases that it used to have etc.
