I’ve been doing some work for a lady who owns two retail stores. One of the tasks on my list is to implement a decent backup solution for the point of sales systems.
Whenever I plan backups I like to consider the following scenarios:
- Accidental deletion of data or file corruption (’my documents’)
- A complete system failure like a failed HDD or severe OS issue that renders the system unable to boot
- A disaster that destroys the equipment along with the whole site
When I was looking for the right solution for her businesses I wanted to make sure that I covered those scenarios.
I considered hardware first. I decided that an external HDD or entry level NAS box would be the best way to go. The shops are next to each other, so a wireless link to a shared NAS box would work, or I could recommend external hard drives for both POS systems [The POS systems are Windows XP with MYOB Retail Manager]. Maxtor have a Shared Storage Drive that’s essentially a networked external HDD - It’s a single drive so it doesn’t offer RAID0 or RAID1 but the price fits well. The owner has a laptop that she keeps at home that has plenty of HDD space so the plan is to backup to the shared storage drive and then periodically copy the latest backups on to her laptop so that she has an offsite restore point.
Next I put some thought into the actual backup process. I wanted to keep the costs down so I considered the XP backup utility or robocopy to copy the MYOB data and my docs. I also considered using XP’s ASR feature as a complete system restore solution. I’ve tested ASR before and it seemed to work OK but there were several things I wasn’t comfortable with:
- It’s designed to backup Windows systems files and applications. I can’t be sure that it will backup up third-party software. It doesn’t actually backup data (documents).
- It can’t be scheduled.
- You need to create a floppy disk and burn a CD for each ASR image that you create.
Having used early versions of Ghost before (more for deployment than backup mind you), I considered using it take an image of the PC in case an OS rebuild was required in future. I didn’t think however that I would be able to schedule ghost images. In the old days you would have to boot into DOS to take a ghost image. I had heard though that later versions of Ghost can take images while windows is running and that was enough to persuade me to check out the latest version of Ghost - Ghost 10.
I downloaded and read through the ghost manual and was extremely impressed, so I downloaded the Ghost 10 trial and tried it out. It had me sold in an instant, and this is why:
- It can take images while windows is running
- The images (recovery points as they call them) can be scheduled
- A base recovery point can be taken, and then incremental recovery sets can be scheduled. On the machine I tested on I took an image of an 8GB partition and the initial image file was 6GB (using standard compression). That night, the scheduled image (system backup) ran and created a recovery storage point of around 2MB (MB not GB).
- You can browse the recovery points/sets and individual restore files from them directly. By default Ghost creates a recovery point each month and then a recovery set (the incremental backups) each day. This means that you have a complete history of backups that you can restore from. In this respect it’s similar to running VSS on your XP workstation.
- Ghost can delete older recovery points when you meet a threshold so that your destination does not run out of space
- If a complete system failure occurs, you simply boot from the ghost CD which loads NIC drivers and USB/Firewire drivers. You grab the recovery set from the backup destination (network or USB/Firewire drive) and tell it to restore.
Ghost 10 licenses are around $110(AUD) and in my opinion are well worth the investment. The solution that I’ve proposed for the shop owner is to purchase 2 copies of Ghost 10 and a Maxtor shared storage drive to backup each machine to. She can then copy the most recent recovery point to her laptop each week. Although she won’t have daily offsite backups, she will have a fallback if there is a complete disaster. For any other scenario she will have the ability to restore single files easily herself or a restore complete system (with my help - Symantec are still marketing Ghost 10 to more advanced users).