There are motherboards out these days with a RAID 1 IDE controller on the motherboard which you can use when you cannot get the money for a proper server with a RAID controller. That way at least you get some form of hardware mirroring. I have used SW mirroring in 2k server but have never needed to boot off the other drive so far so I can say how well it works.
Personally, I'd keep my hands off anything that needs to be a server and is not running server based hardware. If budget is a problem, RAID 1 IDE on the motherboard I think would be an option worth looking into.
Sam K
Yusuf Mayet wrote:
Guido, In my experience using software raid has many limitations as opposed to the use of hardware raid.For instance hot standby of faulty disks this can't be done without losing the production system for that configuration change. Possibly you could get away at small companies as there reliance on the production system is not high. Yusuf -----Original Message----- From: GRILLENMEIER,GUIDO (HP-Germany,ex1) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 14 January, 2004 23:25 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Backups I wondered that in this whole discussion about how to protect yourself from a harddrive-failure the cheapest way - why don't you just use the built-in SW-Raid features of your Windows Server? Naturally, I'm not really a big fan of this SW-Raid and have truly never used them myself (now why would that be?), but with such a low budged you can't really be too choosy... This would give you all the benefits of an automated failover, obviously at the cost of some CPU of the server - which could well be unnoticible for you. It's at least something to look into. However, I'd be interested to hear, if others have already used the Windows SW-Raid features and how their experience is with these...?? Is it ok for the really small companies with NO budged (but a second disk), or would you keep your fingers off? /Guido -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Jake Connor Sent: Mittwoch, 14. Januar 2004 20:23 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] Backups No they are too cheap to buy a few hard drives and a raid card :-\ I'll look into Ghost and pcInspector. Do you know if Drive Image by Symantec will work on Win2k server or just workstations? On Jan 14, 2004, at 11:09 AM, Mark Nold wrote:They would spring for Ghost or pcInspector or the like, but not 80 bucks for a 120G IDE drive that you could slap in there to mirror? Do you have any "dead" pc's lying around that you can grab the IDE drive from? Not the best I know, but seems like it would be better than re-imaging your drive after every change you made in AD to keep your "backup" fresh. My 2cents anyway....-----Original Message----- From: Jake Connor [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 11:03 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] Backups Because it's a small company and I have recommended it a hundred times but in a nutshell, they are too cheap even though we have experiencedaserver crash which took about almost a week to restore everything (which costs more for paying me) and they don't realize a RAID will solve about almost everything and cheaper. On Jan 14, 2004, at 10:25 AM, Coleman, Hunter wrote:If you're concerned about the hard drive failing, why not just set upaRAID1 (mirror) configuration? Cost would be low, and you won't havetoworry about creating disk images and swapping hard drives around. Hunter -----Original Message----- From: Jake Connor [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 11:00 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] Backups First of all, thank you for the information :-) I would like to make a complete hard drive backup onto the firewire drive (like a complete image) so that if the one on my system crashed thenIcan just get the hard drive on the fire wire cable and put it into theIDEribbons. I probably should have mentioned that what I am using is just a fire wire cable that lets you connect any type of IDE drive to it. So with pcinspector, would it be able to make a complete copy of the hard drive (with all the partitions, bootup stuff, etc) to another hard drive and have that hard drive be exactly the same as the hard drive in the system so in the event of a crash I can just swap the hard drive, start up the system, and everything is back to normal with all my Active Directory users, etc? Thanks once again in advanced. Jake On Jan 14, 2004, at 4:25 AM, GRILLENMEIER,GUIDO (HP-Germany,ex1)wrote:using a FW drive, you may run into issues with available drivers to allow you to copy the data without first re-installing an OS on the box. There are some cool free-utilities (such as a disk-cloner) that you maywantto look at - but I have no idea if they support drives connected via FW: http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htmso in worst case, you'd have to restore the OS onto the newharddrive(default install - incl. the FW driver, if this is not in thedefault)and then restore your backup afterwards onto this new drive. Otherwise you may preferr using a backup on tape afterall, for which you can get routines to completely restore a server from bare-metal fully automated. /Guido -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Jake Connor Sent: Mittwoch, 14. Januar 2004 00:04 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [ActiveDir] Backups I have a schedule backup that just copies everything on my harddriveto a drive on my firewire drive. If my active hard drive crashes, how do I restore it with the dataonmy firewire drive so I can just boot up the new hard drive and itwillhave all the active directory users and all that stuff? 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