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Richard McDonald Woods

Ensuring successful backup/restore after disk crash

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I don't care about rapid reinstallations from bare metal as I strangely enjoy doing fresh installs. Something about refreshing a computer which makes it breathe easier....  That said, I do care about losing my data, documents, family pictures, etc....

 

I'd consider a cloud-based tool, but as a photographer I keep all the huge "RAW" files of my images - my concert, wedding, airshow, and personal photo library is north of 150GB alone - nevermind the archives of flight simulation software I need to store in the event of a reinstallation. Since all this data is quite voluminous, I use a copy/mirroring tool called Vice Versa to copy my important data folders to a second physical drive in my system. Drive crash? Protected on a daily basis, keeping my losses to an acceptable minimum.

 

I also use the same tool to occasionally copy the data off to an external drive which is stored in a "secure offsite location". I'll be miserable enough with the loss of my house and possessions, but at least not all of my important family records and computer items won't be lost forever.

 

-Greg

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I have a Seagate portable drive.  I backup my documents folder that has the FSX saved flights and logbook in it.  As far as a FSX crash goes, I honestly am not computer savvy enough to do that lol.  I also think that if something were to crash, I wouldn't know how to restore the files anyway.  Sometimes I think FSX just gets fussy for no reason and likes new installs anyway.  I keep all my add .exe files on thumb drives and have them backed up to the Seagate.  I made a spread sheet of all the add ons that include the product codes.  After I install FSX, I just go down the list and reinstall one by one.  The whole process now from deleting them all to reinstalling takes approx. 4 hours.

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I would start by buying a NAS unit and doing a backup on there. I think a regularly scheduled backup of the whole drive image (if feasible, with last two or three images kept) would work well.

 

Unless you have a laptop that you regularly carry to a different place (parents' or friends place, maybe office, if in a small company), a true offsite backup will be problematic. Even if you have a relatively fast connection, getting a terabyte of cloud storage or so up will take a long time. Rotating two external drives in an offsite location would be a viable compromise (e.g. keep one in the office, taking it home on wednesday night to backup, keep one at friends, update every weekend). Keeping just one offsite renders you at risk if event happened when backing up.

 

If you don't want an all disk backup, then I believe a cloud service such as Google Drive will be a good solution. I keep my important files there, and they just announced new payment scheme, 1.99 a month for 100GB space, 9.99 for a terabyte. Plenty of space for your pictures, documents and installers.

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Now that the AVSIM forums are recovered from their RAID problems, it has set me thinking again about the vulnerability to disk crashes of my own flight simulator PCs.

Would anyone care to explain how their back-up processes are implemented to ensure a rapid recovery from a disk crash? I am sure that many of us would like to improve our own back-up processes.

I now have 3 PCs, each having some of my software stored. I have had a look at both Crashplan (www9.crashplan.com/landing/index.html) and Backblaze (www.backblaze.com). Neither appear to provide backing up for application programs.

I want to set up a comprehensive, inexpensive, automatic back-up of all my flight sim files - in other words - click and forget. Any hints and tips you have will be gratefully received.


Cheers, Richard

Intel Core i7-7700K @ 4.2 GHz, 16 GB memory, 1 TB SSD, GTX 1080 Ti, 28" 4K display

Win10-64, P3Dv5, PMDG 748 & 777, Milviz KA350i, ASP3D, vPilot, Navigraph, PFPX, ChasePlane, Orbx 

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If you have a ton of data eg scenery files then all of the 3rd pary back ups like crash plan will be slooow , like 6 months in my case so I bought a 3TB disk and use seagate disc wizard.

 

Its best to back up to your own hardrive either internal or external that way you can do a quick back up every time you update your sim.

 

Which way will you be going, hard disc or 3rd party?


ZORAN

 

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I use Backblaze myself - I like the idea of having everything offsite. Protects you in case of fire, flood etc.

"Fast" is probably a relative term with it unless you order their service where they ship you a drive with the backups on it though - even then it'd be at least a day probably. Also regarding what Zoran said about backup speed, you can actually send them a "seed" drive with the data on it if I recall correctly. They start your backup set using that and then from there all the uploads are small because it's just the parts that change.

 

Some sort of onsite backup system using regular hard drive imaging to an external RAID enclosure or something like that would probably the fastest - I'd still probably use something like Backblaze in conjunction with it though just to have the extra security in case of the types of things I mentioned though.


Ryan Maziarz
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Now that the AVSIM forums are recovered from their RAID problems, it has set me thinking again about the vulnerability to disk crashes of my own flight simulator PCs.

Would anyone care to explain how their back-up processes are implemented to ensure a rapid recovery from a disk crash? I am sure that many of us would like to improve our own back-up processes.

I now have 3 PCs, each having some of my software stored. I have had a look at both Crashplan (www9.crashplan.com/landing/index.html) and Backblaze (www.backblaze.com). Neither appear to provide backing up for application programs.

I want to set up a comprehensive, inexpensive, automatic back-up of all my flight sim files - in other words - click and forget. Any hints and tips you have will be gratefully received.

I take an images of my PC via O&O DiskImage, and Windows Backup/Restore to an external drive every month. I do file level backups as well. This gives me the flexibility to either recovery the entire drive, or an ind file. It's already helped me once!

 

John

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I run all my FS on a laptop. So I make a complete system back up of my Samsung 500GB SSD via WIN7 control Panel on an external drive. (Actually these are two alternating external drives stored at different places.) I run this BU every time I make important changes or improvements. In average every 2 to 4 weeks taking 2 hours (approx. 400 GB). In case of an SSD failure I can start the laptop via the system repair DVD-ROM also created by WIN7 control panel back up and restore app. This will clone the whole system on a freshly built in SSD. The procedure I already used successfully during the switch from internal hard drive to internal SSD and is also designed for desktop PCs.

Greetings,

Claus

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Check out shadow protect - we use this on desktops and servers as well. can also recover system to another pc if need be.

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