Ghosting vs. XCopy vs. NTBackup 1

[Dollie]

I'm looking at several different options to backup 3 W2K servers to an external hard drive. We currently back up only data to tape. Because of the questionable reliability of tapes (I've had 3 where the media snapped, one that was eaten by the tape drive, and others where the backup could not be verified), I want to start backing up to the external (320 gb) HD's for redundancy.

I was thinking of creating an NTBackup or XCopy script to do this, but it's been suggested that ghosting the servers would be better (all of our servers have the same config).

From my understanding, ghosting is a DOS function, and essentially the servers would be disconnected during the ghosting so no changes would be made to the hard drive. I'd prefer this to be an automatic function that would not require a reboot.

Does anyone have any opinions or suggestions?

TIA!

 

[ntinlin]

There are other utils that will do a 'live' backup.

Symantec's LiveState or Paragon's ??? will do this but cost quite a lot per server.

Really depends whether you want a disaster recovery type solution or just a guarantee that your data won't disappear.

If the former then you need one of the above apps if the latter then robocopy would do perfectly adequately.

Neill

 

[Dollie]

Looks like I need to look at Symantec again. I was looking at Ghost and thinking it *might* work. I hadn't looked at LiveState at all. Thank you for the pointer!

 

[comtec17]

Keep in mind, disk will fail 10x more often then tape.

The latest versions of robocopy are very cool due to the incremental file copie.