New
#1
Penitent sinner, or, how can I improve upon my backup strategy?
So I have been running two identical 1TB hard disks on one machine in both a RAID1 and RAID 0 configuration using Intel Rapid Storage Technology RAID support. I created three volumes as follows:
C-drive (RAID1) - operating system (Win 7 64 bit), programs and a few data files in My Documents
D-drive (RAID1) - nearly all my documents, occupying around 500GB
E-drive (RAID0) - some very large cache files that need to be accessed and loaded rapidly for a particular software application.
Being a tight ghit I figured I'd go for two identical hard drives and create the RAID1 partition for stability and the RAID0 for speed rather than have a separate SSD drive for speed.
I used Windows 7 backup to create an image of the C drive onto an external disk plus a recovery CD-ROM, and backed up my D and E drive contents onto separate external disks.
Everythying was fine for a few weeks but then I got a message saying that the RAID1 array had got a problem. Unfortunately the problem appeared to be corruption in the master boot record and so I couldn't boot up, and using the Windows repair installation got me into an infinite boot up loop.
Nonplussed by this I decided to reinstall my disk image onto the RAID1 C drive volume. Except that I couldn't, since I just got an error message (I can't remember which) when I ran the CD-ROM essentially saying that it couldn't reimage from the external drive. Thankfully I didn't delete the disk image from the external drive even though it was useless (or so I thought).
So I decided to abandon the RAID and bought myself an SSD which I installed for use as both the C and the E drive contents, keeping one of the two platter drives from the RAID configuration as a D drive so that I didn't have to copy all my data back over. I reinstalled Windows all over again, and spent a day configuring everything (including putting what had been my E drive files onto the SSD C drive), and doing all the updates. Then on rebooting I got another error saying windows couldn't boot up, and the repair installation feature this time failed to even find Windows.
What I think might have happened was that there must have been something left over on what had become the D drive platter disk from the old RAID1 C drive that confused the system at boot-up, because my next action was to enter DOS via the repair installation, and simply reformat the "old" C drive on the platter disk, thus deleting all the operating system files carried over from the original Windows RAID1 configuration. I then reinstalled Windows again onto the SSD, this time knowing that the 1TB platter drive contained only personal data files on the D drive plus around 500GB of empty space where the C and E partitions used to be. Since then the system has been totally stable. I have my operating system and programs on the C drive, my large cache files are also now on the C drive, and my personal data files are on the D (platter hard drive) drive, along with all the unused space on that platter drive that used to be the C drive and half the E partition.
Unfortunately in the process of all this I realised that in the original RAID1 configuration I'd saved a few critical personal files on the C drive in Users. A bit of Googling showed me that I could potentially read files from a mirror disk if I mounted them as a VHD. So I connected my external hard drive with the mirror image on it, mounted as a VHD and presto! there were my missing files.
Now to my questions. What I would like to do, is to create a mirror of the C drive somewhere (I'm thinking of creating a new partition, let's call it F drive, using the extra capacity that my documents are not using, on the platter drive). And I'd copy it onto an external drive as an off site backup, just as I will continue to copy the D drive contents regularly as backups. That way, if the D drive fails I can put in the now spare 1TB hard drive that used to be in my RAID set up, and if the C drive fails I can reimage using the image from the D drive without having to faff with external disks.
However, I'm not sure why the original image failed to reinstall given that I know through reading the VHD that it contained viable files, and I wonder if there is any way of testing an image for its ability to reimage (other than trying to reinstall an image, knowing that if that fails I have to spend a couple of days reinstalling Windows the hard way). Should I use Windows 7, Easeus, Macrium, etc? Should I now be able to safely delete the external hard drive image that thankfully gave me the missing files I thought I'd lost forever, since that image related to a RAID configation that I no longer have? What should I do with the CD that I created, is that now useless or should I hang onto it, and if I use say Macrium to image my disk must I restore it with a Macrium boot CD, what if that CD gets corrupted, will the Windows 7 disk be OK, since maybe it was the restore disk that wasn't working that prevented my original reimage? And if I make an image of my C drive onto the F drive and subsequently make changes like adding new software, should I delete the image and make a new image, or will Macrium etc modify the image file to update it with the changes?
Sorry if some of these are noobie questions, I have installed and reinstalled various versions of Windows many times but have only just recently tried disk imaging, and the one system critical time I tried it, it failed, forcing me to go back to the tried and tested but ultimately slow and fiddly reinstall option.