What's an optimal backup strategy with 2nd HDD (ultrabay)?

[trharlan]

What I Have:
T60p with 5400RPM 100GB drive
New ultrabay adapter
New 7200RPM 100GB drive

What I'd like to do:
1. Make the new (faster) drive primary (by installing it in the primary HDD bay).
2. Put the old drive in the tray, and make it so swappable that I can be up and running in the event of primary drive failure with only a screwdriver and five minutes.
3. In furtherance of #2, make sure that the predesktop area lives on both drives.
4. In furtherance of #2, find a way to save documents to both drives without necessitating a regular full backup.

Can any of this be done? I suspect that I may need to create an extra partition on the backup to handle the document saves.

I do not object to paying $20-$40 for third party software if it works and if it is not redundant to Rescue and Recovery.

Thanks for reading this far, and I thank you for your advice.

[Ken Fox]

What I Have:
T60p with 5400RPM 100GB drive
New ultrabay adapter
New 7200RPM 100GB drive

What I'd like to do:
1. Make the new (faster) drive primary (by installing it in the primary HDD bay).
2. Put the old drive in the tray, and make it so swappable that I can be up and running in the event of primary drive failure with only a screwdriver and five minutes.
3. etc.

You can not have two bootable drives coexisting in the same system like this. Perhaps the closest you could come would be to clone the main drive and then write over the master boot record so that this 2nd drive isn't bootable, then restore the MBR quickly if the drive were needed. Drive failures are nowhere near common enough to monkey with any of this, in my opinion.

You SHOULD image your main drive with Norton Ghost, Acronis, or Rescue and Recovery, and be prepared to restore it if necessary. If needed, putting a new drive into the main carrier and rewriting to it from an image should not take more than 30 minutes. Of course, you do want to regularly back up your data so that this can be restored later no matter what happens.

[rkawakami]

1. Make the new (faster) drive primary (by installing it in the primary HDD bay).

Use Ghost, Acronis or your favorite cloning program to copy your existing drive onto the new one. Swap drives and boot the new (cloned) drive to make sure it works fine. Whenever I've done this with a new (read: different make or size) drive, Windows recognizes the "new" disk and requests a re-boot.

2. Put the old drive in the tray, and make it so swappable that I can be up and running in the event of primary drive failure with only a screwdriver and five minutes.

I believe that you could simply remove the main drive and boot from the backup that's mounted in the Ultrabay hard drive adapater. This works for me with a T23. While this can get you up-and-running fast, it does prevent you from using an optical drive in the Ultrabay.

3. In furtherance of #2, make sure that the predesktop area lives on both drives.

Depending upon the clone software and/or the drive being used as the target, you may also have to use a special diskette to enable the hidden partition.

4. In furtherance of #2, find a way to save documents to both drives without necessitating a regular full backup.

I believe that this can be done if you do as you surmised, which is to partition your drive into two separate areas; applications and data. Assuming you have all of the install disks and that you also backup the "application" partition whenever a new program is installed, your main concern seems to be the ease and safety of your data backups. Partitioning your disk into the two areas will make it easier (and faster) to backup your data. For example, with Ghost you can select any source partition and clone it to any target partition. You can perform your data backups every week (or daily if mission-critical), while backing up the application partition only when you've made changes.

One word of warning: Do not have both bootable disks installed in the system at the same time and boot/re-boot. Doing so screwed up one of my disks as Windows apparently got confused as to which one was had the "real" operating system on it.

[trharlan]

Thank you both for your reasoned replies.

I should note that I experienced three drive failures in two years of my T40. I use (and carry) my laptops quite frequently, and my data is quite precious to me.

[Ken Fox]

Thank you both for your reasoned replies.

I should note that I experienced three drive failures in two years of my T40. I use (and carry) my laptops quite frequently, and my data is quite precious to me.

I travel to France twice a year, both times for a month (I'm trying to learn French and spending time in a language school). I take my X32 with me and also dread the thought of having a hard disk failure far from home. Here's what I do.

Each time before I leave home, I image the hard drive of the X32 and then clone the contents to a spare drive that resides in a small 2.5" USB2 enclosure. Since the drive isn't anywhere near full, there is lots of free space on the cloned USB2 drive.

During my trip I use the cloned drive for data backup (I have a USB2 flash drive I take along as well which gets more use for the backups).

If I was to have a catastrophic drive failure, I would remove the cloned spare drive from the USB2 box and swap it in for the failed drive; I'd expect it to work even though one or two copy protected programs might have hiccups.

So far, I haven't had to use the spare drive on my trips and hope I'll never need it. It is nice, however, to know that I do have a spare drive that should work when dropped in, should it be needed.