It sounds like your biggest concern is a HD failure, or an unexpected
software crash/update. A quick amazon search turns up hardware disk
duplicators, where you just drop in 2 drives and it clones them. I
would think something like that would accomplish what you are trying to
go for. I think you can also get SATA devices that do raid Transparent
to the OS Can you boot off a DROBO?.
A long long time ago (Server 2000 maybe? I don't think drives were SATA
yet), I would use the software raid built into windows. I'm pretty sure
I could pull one of the mirrored drives, and it would boot another
machine of identical hardware. Once a month change the disk and store
it with your spare hardware.
On 12/22/2017 4:01 PM, Forrest Christian (List Account) wrote:
If I could put it on a VM, I would definitely consider it.
Unfortunately, due to the fact that these machines are not really
'servers' or 'workstations' but instead 'automation/test platforms',
that is not really a possibility. The OS on these machines need
direct access to the hardware. Often, the drivers/software are doing
horrible things under the surface to windows to make it work. Adding
a VM layer just isn't practical in this case. National Instruments
describes it best:
"NI hardware is not supported on VMs due to communication challenges
and the possibility of incorrect data.Virtual machines generally
cannot access the PCI bus. As such, PCI- and PCIe-based instruments
are inherently incompatible with VMs, as are MXI connected PXI and
PXIe chassis. Modern VMs often allow access to USB ports (known as USB
pass-through). Given the hosted nature of the VM, the variable speed
of data transfer associated with USB pass-through may cause errors
when communicating with DAQ devices."
My experience is that even pci or pcie passthrough which is supported
in some VM's still isn't enough to permit this stuff to run reliably -
it's a lot like the USB-passthrough issue described above.
In my experience, failures are usually going to be software or disk,
not the underlying hardware. If the underlying hardware fails, I
realize that I'm stuck unless I have identical hardware. Knowing
this, I often actually have an identical motherboard and/or server
setting as part of the spares. And by identical, I mean exact
version, often bought at the same time, or from the same batch.
On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 10:08 AM, Josh Luthman
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Images for Windows between any two machines simply isn't
dependable. DO NOT EXPECT IT TO WORK.
Now if you can put all your stuff in a VM, you're set. Put it in
Dropbox for a cheap smart (bit change only) backup.
Josh Luthman
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Direct: 937-552-2343 <tel:%28937%29%20552-2343>
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On Dec 21, 2017 11:06 PM, "Forrest Christian (List Account)"
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Normally backups around here are file-based, I.E. I want to
make sure I don't lose data.
I have a couple of computers now which I really would hate to
have to rebuild due to hardware failure. These are generally
computers which run a machine, such as the automatic test
system and the pick and place machine. These machines area
all typically single-drive (non-mirrored) mostly off the shelf
hardware running various versions of windows. I'd like to
take a full image, and have at least a reasonable chance of
putting it back on similar hardware (probably same
motherboard, maybe different storage medium) and it just work.
It used to be that the tool for this was Norton Ghost. But
that's been discontinued (and I understand it was going
downhill before that). So I'm looking for whatever the
current modern version is.
I know there's a few tools out there which do this (Macrium,
Acronis, etc). But the reviews are all littered with
failures. Unfortunately it's hard to tell how much of this is
lack of clue and how much of this is broken software.
I'm wondering if anyone has experience with using these modern
equivalents? Preferably something which runs on a range of
Windows OS'es, and can dump the image onto NAS.
--
*Forrest Christian* /CEO//, PacketFlux Technologies, Inc./
Tel: 406-449-3345 | Address: 3577 Countryside Road, Helena, MT
59602
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--
*Forrest Christian* /CEO//, PacketFlux Technologies, Inc./
Tel: 406-449-3345 | Address: 3577 Countryside Road, Helena, MT 59602
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> |
http://www.packetflux.com <http://www.packetflux.com/>
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