Is Fastora ExBoot the Holy Grail of Backups?

"What I want," said a client after her hard drive committed suicide a couple of years ago, "Is a backup drive that I can just plug in and run my computer from."

"That's what we all want," I said (after spending many hours reformatting her replaced-under-warranty hard drive and restoring her data from 1) the month-old backup CDs and 2) the new files on the laptop she'd rented while shipping the PC tower back to HP), "but it doesn't exist." Not for ordinary consumer PCs running Windows, anyway.

Hers was the kind of problem that RAID was designed to handle: an actual physical failure of the disk rather than a corruption of the data. If one in a series of RAID disks fails, you just switch one of the "mirror" disks into the master position and add a new blank disk in and presto! You're up and running. Indeed, power users like the Ur-Guru expect to have to do this fairly frequently, since their computers are hard at work at least 18 hours a day (24 if they're acting as web and mail servers). Stacks of burned out hard drives are a common sight in data centers.

But most small and home office users use single-disk desktop computers and are not even remotely likely to open up the machine so they can start switching drives around. (And who can blame them? I've found some scary things inside of those cases.) What we ordinary computer users want to be able to do is to plug something in and have the computer come back to life. We want to be able to get back to work as soon as possible after the drive deconstructs itself—on our own computers, with our own software.

Programs like Symantec/Norton Ghost and Acronis TrueImage can create exact images of your hard drive, saving hours of reformatting and reinstallation as well as saving your own files from oblivion. This is a Very Good Thing. But you can't just connect the drive with the Ghost backup on it to your computer and power up straight into Windows. You have to run Ghost and restore the image. Granted, this doesn't take very long over a FireWire or USB2 connection, but it's an extra step, one which can frustrate and intimidate many people. (Almost everyone these days has to use a computer, but not everyone has to like it, and many people don't.)

Taiwanese hardware design and manufacturing company Axiomtek may well have the answer to this problem. The latest addition to their Fastora line of Network Attached Storage devices is called the ExBoot (as in External Boot-Up). To look at, it's a USB 2.0 external hard drive in a rather snazzy blue-lit case, complete with one-touch button, and it comes in 3.5" (desktop-sized), 2.5" (laptop-sized), and 1.8" (microdrive) models. The proprietary software provides options for both one-touch and incremental backups, but its truly unique feature is its ability to replace your existing hard drive—as is, through your USB port. (You may need to configure your BIOS to allow booting from an external drive first.)

This is so amazing that Charlie White, executive producer of Digital Media Net, waxed positively rhapsodic after testing it, and gave it a 9.7 out of 10. (In case you're wondering, almost no hardware or software product reviewed in the computer mags gets better than 8 out of 10, or at best 4.5 out of 5 stars.) This tops the ratings I've seen so far for the much-hyped Mirra Personal Server (about which more in Friday's newsletter), though it doesn't have the ability to back up more than one machine.

Personally, I'm absolutely dying to try one.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 5-27-05: Backing Up Video

Everyone knows that computers are a big part of the film industry, especially when it comes to animation and special effects. What not everyone thinks about is the particular backup and storage issues faced by the likes of George Lucas, Pixar, and ILM—and, in fact, everyone who works with digital video, whether or not they’re taking in millions of dollars at the box office.

Since the beginning of time—or at least the beginning of computing—there have been certain categories of people who find themselves with Big Files. The actual number of bytes, or kilobytes, or megabytes, or gigabytes, that defines a Big File increases over time, along with the size of hard drives, the speed of processors, and the amount of RAM (memory) you can put into your computer.

But while the absolute sizes increase exponentially every few years, the relative sizes of different kinds of files remain fairly constant. Text files are small. Even formatted word-processing files are fairly small. Image files are larger. Music files are larger still. Executable files (software) seem to get bigger every year, but most programs will still fit on a single CD. Video is where it starts getting Big, and 3-D animation involves Serious Bigness.

Think for a minute about the kind of video that you usually encounter online. In order to be watched over an internet connection (even a fast one, never mind dial-up) without looking as if it’s been stuck in slow motion, a video has to fit within certain parameters. Web videos are almost always short—under 10 minutes in length. They’re also usually very small in terms of their dimensions—only a few inches across. And they’ve been highly compressed to reduce the file size, which means the image quality isn’t usually very sharp. It’s good enough to see what’s going on, but if you blow it up to full-screen size (even on a 14” laptop) it looks awful.

Digital video for the big screen—or even the wide-screen TV—is a whole different ball game. Those mind-blowing special effects in the latest hit movies need vast cyber-acres to store all the detail that goes into creating them. In fact, they take up more space on a computer than on an actual film reel, or would if bytes translated directly into physical space.

Yes, you can fit the final film on two DVDs—a mere 9 GB. But the difference between a final film “print” of a special-effects scene and the billions of tiny triangles used to create Yoda and his light-saber is like the difference between the space needed to store a VHS tape of you walking down the street and the space needed for you to actually walk down the street. Computer animators have to create the whole street and every step you take on the way. So gigabytes, to digital video professionals, are small change. Their weekly workload is measured in terabytes. (A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes, or a trillion bytes, just to give you a sense of the scale we’re talking about here.)

That means that animators and video post-production professionals (like the Ur-Guru before he became a software developer) have never been able to use the same storage or backup solutions that ordinary home or home office users, or even many mid-size business users and non-IT corporations do. Digital post-production has been one area in which tape backups have tended to dominate, because tape was the only option available for those Big Files.

Now, however, according to an article in Digital Animators, even the animators and videographers are starting to prefer external hard drives to tape backups. A quick cost analysis (provided in a table in the article) demonstrates one good reason: 500 GB of FireWire hard drive storage costs only $500, while the least expensive tape system is almost $2500 for the drive, plus about $60 per 200 GB tape cartridge. Tape cartridges and removable hard drives are about the same size, too, so both are portable.

Of course, external hard drives are just as vulnerable to failure as internal hard drives are. “After I burned out my third hard drive,” said a friend who is working on a documentary at one of the local community colleges, “I realized there was something wrong with the equipment in the studio.” And replacing hard drives costs more than replacing tape cartridges.

Portability also makes theft easier. A leaked copy of “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” appeared on the internet the same day it opened in the theaters. I don’t know for sure that it was a backup tape or disk that was taken rather than a finished DVD (which is even more portable), but the need to keep multiple copies of all these files does make it easier for one to go missing without anyone noticing.

What I am sure of, though, is that backing up Yoda is one reason for the massive production budgets of special-effects films, not to mention the massive collections of hard drives that people like the Ur-Guru have built into their workstations.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 5-20-05: Retrospect 7 vs. TrueImage 8 (and let’s not forget Ghost 9)

(Note: this post is late (and back-dated) because I was out of town over the weekend for my 20-year high school reunion and my mother is the only person in the country without an internet connection. Those of you subscribed to the e-mail list got your newsletter on time, though.)

Last week I promised to check out TrueImage and Retrospect for those who don’t want to go the Bart-PE route of creating a boot CD with Ghost 8 on it, but are also not too sure about Ghost 9.

I downloaded trial versions of both Dantz Retrospect 7 and TrueImage 8 to check them out. One thing I liked about TrueImage immediately (tipped off by a comment on the blog after my entry on Ghost 9) was the fact that you could create a bootable program CD and use it to back up from outside Windows. It goes like this:

1) Install TrueImage

2) Start TrueImage (you may notice that the icons and setup look surprisingly like DriveImage, the product which Symantec subsumed into Ghost 9)

3) Select “Create bootable Rescue Media” under “Tools” in the side panel or from the top menu

4) Insert a CD into a CD-R drive, or prepare 7 floppy disks for a machine with a floppy drive. I chose the CD.

5 ) Follow the remaining instructions to burn the CD.

6) Reboot your computer with the CD in the drive. After some time, TrueImage will start up, looking exactly like it did in Windows, except at a lower resolution. Click “Create Image.”

At this point two things happened: first, I got a notice that it would take 3 hours to back up my 20 GB hard drive, and second, I got a notice that with the trial version you have to make backups from within Windows. I wasn’t about to devote 3 hours of my day to doing that, or rather, to leave the computer for 3 hours when I needed it.

Yes, I know that in theory you can use your computer while a program like TrueImage, Ghost 9, or Retrospect is backing up. But my feeling is that the more a file is changing, the more likely there is to be an error in the copying, and I don’t want to take that kind of chance. This is one reason for scheduling backups to take place in the middle of the night, which is when the major systems backing up to tape usually do it. (If you’re nocturnal, like the Ur-Guru, then you would schedule the backup for the time the rest of us are getting out of bed.) I tend to start my Ghost 8 backups (which also, of course, mean not being able to use the computer) when I am going out to an appointment or taking a break for lunch.

Anyway, TrueImage looked pretty promising, and I would take it over Ghost 9 purely on the basis of being able to back up from outside Windows, though it takes longer. (Ghost 9, so far as I could tell, took about an hour and a half to back up, and part of that was due to the USB 1.1 connection speed—though I also had less on my drive at the time I used it.)

Then I installed the trial of Retrospect 7 and started it up. It opens to the “Backup Overview” screen and offers scheduled or immediate backups, and also progressive (incremental) or complete backups. There’s no way (that I could find) to create a CD that will make a backup, but it is possible to use an existing backup to make a CD, or rather a series of them, that you can restore from.

I went through the wizard and selected (I thought) my C drive to back up to my X drive (that’s the letter I gave to my external hard drive). The wizard gives you choices about what you want to back up: Documents and Settings, My Computer, My Computer and computers on my network, and Let me choose. Since I was aiming to make an image of the entire drive a la Ghost, I selected “My Computer.” The next screen asks you to select the types of files you want to back up; in this case they were all checked automatically. Then “Where do you want the backup to be stored?” and “When do you want to back up?” Following that you’re asked to name your backup set. It’s not just a backup, you see, it’s a backup set, because any incremental backups will be put in the same place. You’re then given the option to compress your data, which it’s almost always a good idea to do, and to encrypt it, ditto. (Encryption is one point very much in Retrospect’s favor.)

Then you click Start Now and find out that it will take 3 hours to back up your half-full 20 GB hard drive, or at least, that’s what happened to me.

After a while of this, my computer got bored and went to sleep. After a little while longer, so did I.

When I woke up in the morning, I found that Retrospect had finished with my C drive and was trying to copy my X drive onto itself. This was obviously not going to work, not least because the 80 GB X drive only had about 20 GB of room left on it, so I cancelled the backup.

I think I could avoid that particular problem by selecting “Let me choose” in the wizard, but one trial was enough for me. There wasn’t anything in Retrospect to suggest to me that it would be a better choice than TrueImage. There certainly wasn’t anything to suggest it would be a better solution than Ghost 8, which even on USB 1.1 made a complete drive copy in less than 90 minutes.

However, it’s Retrospect, or rather Retrospect Express, that gets bundled with the Maxtor One-Touch drives. I’m not sure how the Express version differs from the full version. At this point, I’m not sure I want to know, either, though I know people for whom it works just fine. It’s probably easiest to use if you aren’t used to something else. It’s also something that works on Macs as well as PCs, which is an obvious point in its favor for Mac users.

Me, I’m going to stick to Ghost 8.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 5-13-05: Kids, Don't Try This at Home

Last week I was lamenting about not being able to use Ghost 8 anymore. While Ghost 9 worked in my trial backup-and-restore, that didn’t cure me of my case of the sulks, nor of my bafflement as to why Ghost 8 couldn’t see my USB drive—an experience I have had before, on another machine, and which led indirectly to one of the worst computer consulting experiences of my life.

The Ur-Guru suggested I take a look into the BIOS (that stands for Basic Input/Output System) to see whether there was something in those settings. So I restarted the computer and made a quick stab for the F2 key, which happens to be the key that enables me to enter Setup on Astarte. (I think it was the DEL key on Keramat; each manufacturer seems to choose its own, though F1 is almost always reserved for Help.) In wandering through the several pages of Setup functions, I was able to switch the infrared port on, but I didn’t find anything that affected USB.

So the Ur-Guru came to my rescue and provided me with a special CD from which I could boot into a “preinstalled environment” (that is to say, a sort of scaled-down operating system) and run Ghost 8. This CD is not produced by Symantec, but was created by a Dutch systems administrator named Bart Lagerweij to make his own life easier. His Bart-PE (there’s that Preinstalled Environment again) is distributed free of charge from http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/. (It's 2 MB download.) Bart is really providing a tremendous service, as the CD is useful for a whole lot of diagnostic and repair functions; Ghost 8 is almost an afterthought from Bart’s perspective.

Before you can create the CD itself and use it, you need to have your Windows XP CD on hand (preferably with Service Packs 1 and 2 integrated, unless you want to engage in a tricky process called slipstreaming, which I personally would rather not get into). If your storage device (CD-ROM, external hard drive, removable drive, or whatever) came with special drivers, you have to put those into the “drivers” subfolder in the directory where you installed the PE-builder. And in order to use the additional software (Symantec Ghost Corporate 8, Nero Burning ROM, Disk Commander and ERD Commander 2002 by Winternals) legally, you also have to buy that software if you don’t own it already.

Then you can start PE-Builder, insert your Windows XP CD, create your .iso file (that’s the extension used by the “image” used to make a CD, particularly a bootable CD), and burn it to a CD. And then you can insert the CD in your CD drive, restart, and see whether it works.

If your eyes are glazing, you’re not alone. Bart-PE was created as a way to make life easier for Bart’s fellow geeks, and while he has made the overall process fairly straightforward (despite the pages of descriptive details, legal disclaimers, and other technical information on the website), this may well not be something you want to do yourself. As I said before, the Ur-Guru created the one I used last week.

However, while I’ve been typing this, I downloaded PE-Builder, installed it, grabbed my XP CD, and created my own CD—admittedly without adding any extra drivers to it. Neither my CD/DVD-writer nor my external hard drive actually came with any additional drivers for Windows XP. (I suppose if I felt really adventurous I could try adding the Windows 98 drivers.) Unfortunately, I also forgot to add the “plugins” folder, so while I got a perfectly good bootable disk, it didn’t have Ghost 8 on it. I’m now trying it again, and the CD (now with rather more data on it) is burning merrily away. Testing this one will require another restart.

So, as you can see, this is a slow process, and for many people it’s not going to be worth it either to do it themselves or to have someone else do it. For those of us who think Ghost 8 is miles better than Ghost 9, it’s definitely worth it.

For the rest of the world, I’m going to report on my cross-comparison between Dantz Retrospect and Acronis TrueImage next week.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 5-6-05: The Ghost of a Chance

After three attempts to repair the power-connector problem with my laptop (and then-only computer), I realized that I would need not one but two computers to replace her. New computers come with warranties, which is good—but to have repairs done under warranty usually means sending the computer back to the manufacturer, which takes a week to ten days, and is NOT good. So I needed not just to back up the data on my machine, but to get a backup machine to use in case something went wrong with the first one.

With a little research and the help of Craigslist and eBay, I was able to purchase two computers with my new-computer budget: a brand-new 15.4" widescreen Gateway, and a used Dell Latitude PIII with a year still remaining on the on-site service contract. The Gateway is still being assembled and shipped, but I picked up the Dell last week and have been busily installing and configuring it.

One thing about new laptops which I don’t much like is that they don’t have floppy disk drives. True, almost no one uses floppies these days, but a floppy drive is a requirement for using Symantec Ghost 8 Corporate, my preferred drive-mirroring program. You create the floppies from within Windows using Ghost Boot Disk and then use them when making or restoring from backups. They run an operating system called PC-DOS and can thus create an image of your drive when Windows is at rest. When Windows is running, something is always changing, so the chance of an error when creating an image is much too high for my comfort. I’d used Ghost 8 with great success on Keramat (the dying computer) and would prefer to go on using it.

Last year, however, Symantec bought PowerQuest, the makers of DriveImage. The good news is that Ghost 9 does not require a floppy drive. The bad news is that it makes its backups from within Windows. This made me nervous. And while PC Magazine and other reviewers gave Ghost 9 good marks, the Ur-Guru panned it—primarily because it couldn’t recognize his RAID controllers and was therefore totally useless to him.

So I was happy to discover that Astarte came with a floppy drive, the kind you swap with the CD drive. I figured I was all set to go on making backups with Ghost 8, at least on my backup machine.

But for some reason Ghost 8 can’t see my external hard drive when I connect it to Astarte’s USB port. (Astarte doesn’t have a FireWire port, one of her few drawbacks.) It can’t see my CD/DVD-writer, either. It seems to be blind to USB, despite the fact that I had it install USB drivers when I made the floppies, and despite the fact that Astarte can see and use both external drives just fine from within Windows.

This meant I had to use Ghost 9. Since I didn’t want to put a full installation, much less my own data, at risk, I decided to test it on the bare system as I’d bought it. (And I was annoyed to discover that while you can restore from the Ghost 9 CD without starting Windows, you can’t back up directly from the CD. What were they thinking?)

To my relief, it worked just fine, but I still don’t feel entirely satisfied, and I’m going to want to test out some alternatives once the Gateway (whose name, incidentally, is Enheduanna) arrives. It may be that I’ll prefer Retrospect, TrueImage, or another program to Ghost now that I’m entering the floppy-free zone.

Backup Blog in the News

If you open today's San Francisco Chronicle to the business section, you'll find Ilana DeBare's article "The Business of Blogging"—and one of the blogs she talks about is this one. Welcome, all you Chronicle readers! Feel free to post comments and make suggestions. Also, I'm planning to start a new blog, FileSlinger™ Favorites, with links to useful sites and products for consultants, coaches, and other independent professionals and small businesses.

Just to show you what a blog can do for your web stats, here are mine from December, before I started the blog, and April, after the blog had been in full swing for four months (but before the Chronicle article came out.) Though my modest multiplying of hits doesn't compare with the 80,000 hits per month on the GreenCine film blog, it's still clear that a blog is a good thing for an independent professional to have.