Thinkpads Forum

I just did this today in preparation for an overseas trip.

I have a SATA 250Gb HD in my Ultrabay which will be used for backups on the road. I use Acronis True Image.

Should the primary HD fail, I will be able to boot from the Ultrabay HD straight into Acronis and restore a backup disk image to a replacement primary HD.

Excellent instructions by MudCrab here:
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=176958

(I used a 256Mb Compact Flash card formatted to FAT32 instead of a USB drive. And my Ultrabay HD instead of a USB HD.)

My approach while at home or on the road is to make regular clones of my primary hard drive to another identical drive in the ultrabay using Acronis TIH. If my primary hard drive gets trashed, all I have to do is swap the clone into the primary drive slot and I'm good to go. The drive replacement operation requires one Swiss Army knife or screw driver and 5 minutes of time and I'm back in action. Works very well for me. YMMV.

zern,

Funny....I was also preparing for a trip and put in a 2nd 150GB hard drive in the ultra bay. But in my case, I had set up a separate boot via BIOS for Ubuntu 7.10. On the primary hard drive, I have a boot into XP Pro. I have Acronis on XP Pro and Partimage on Ubuntu. On both hard drives I have a 2nd partition holding an image of XP Pro and Ubuntu 7.10.

Is that redundancy or is that redundancy? The BIOS in the T61p allows with an F1 at boot up to choose which hard drive boots up.

Alacrity

At home, I use Acronis to back up daily increments to a pair of external 320Gb 3.5" drives.

Using external USB drives means I can access the data from any PC should the main TP dies.

I make a full image every month, then daily increments. Each 320Gb drive stores 3 month's worth of backups, and I alternate drives - one for even months, one for odd months. The daily increment has save my butt a few times from accidentally deleted or overwritten files.

I have thought about making a regular identical clone as par77 suggests. Greta idea. For me however it does not offer the incremental recovery option. But the replacement upon failure would be super fast.

With a 250Gb in my ultrabay, and the factory 100Gb, I can get incremental backups while on the road, at least a month's worth.

The restore should the main drive fails won't be too painful either. Tho not as fast as pae77's setup. I suppose I could carry around another SATA drive that is a direct clone of the primary HD. But that would be overkill?

Having the extra SATA clone while traveling has saved my butt more than a few times, (but I am a high risk user). But they are small and easy to carry, so why not?

Good question pae77.

As a rule, I try and pack as light as possible: this means as few bits and bobs to cart around, and as few bits and bobs to secure or accidentally left behind in hotel rooms.

A 2.5" HD is small - but fragile when outside of the TP shell. How do you protect your spare drives when travelling?

We use one of these below. You can find them on ebay from to me to time for $5.00. The foam insert is for carrying just a drive or pull the foam to carry an ultrabay device. The one pictures is the old school with metal plates in the sides. The newer ones are soft cases. Just search for thinkpad drive case. (FYI: none are currently listed)

http://img175.imageshack.us/img175/3411 ... jpgvw5.jpg

MOD EDIT: Kindly read the forum rules regarding displaying pictures in threads.

Well I just usually keep one in the ultrabay adapter and another one bare, but either way, I keep each drive in their own anti static bags which are then put inside a larger ziplock bag. That package of usually one UB adapter with drive plus one extra bare drive then goes into my laptop bag. Ime, the drives are pretty robust, especially the newer models.

pae,

For interest, please describe what you mean by a "high risk user". I assume I am the same....putzing the Pc to death until some failure occurs. In my case, I am always trying a new o/s or software or hardware.

What type of risk taking putzing do you do?

How often does your hard drive fail when you are playing at risk? This sounds familar so I would like to compare notes.

alacrity

Generally I do pretty much the same as you describe.

I have needed to recover from my cloned backups several times over the past couple of years. Actually, at least twice just within the past year.