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Backing up cabinet hard drives
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LeedsFan:
I've built a few projects over the years and although I have backups of the main data I've come to realise that what I really need is a full backup of the hard drive in each cabinet. Basically when I came to tweak something it dawned on me that should the drive ever fail completely I;d have a hassle to get the cabinet back up and running with the exact same setup and specs.

So basically guys... what's the best way to go about this? I've got six machines here and 5 of those are 30 Gb or less. Only one is a behemoth with 86 GB on the C drive and the data drive is already backed up on 1 TB.

The software I'm gonna use is AOMEI backupper. It looks really simple to use with a neat and easy interface. And it's free!

But I'm torn between cloning each hard drive or creating disc images and collecting them onto one hard drive. The cloning of drives would mean more hard drives, but each drive could be plugged in and running in a matter of minutes should a hard drive fail completely. It's the disc images I don't fully understand. If a hard drive died on me completely how do I restore an image backup onto a fresh drive? There's no operating system on the fresh drive. Do I need to make some kind of boot disc?

Backing up is not something I've done on a big scale, but I can see the possible headaches if I don't get it sorted.
spoot:
If you just wish to have a "snaphot" to restore when a drive dies you can look at Clonezilla.  It will make an image file to other hd, usb device, etc.  Then if want to restore.........boot cd......copy img to hd.
BadMouth:
I use Acronis WD edition. 

With any of this software, to restore you create bootable media, either using a CD or flash drive.  This is done in the software by clicking on "create bootable media" or something like that. 
When the PC in need of restoring boots, select the bootable media as where to boot from.  The bootable media will load enough drivers to get by with (operate an external HD) and give you a point and click interface to restore from.  It's all pretty simple and self explanatory.
http://www.backup-utility.com/bootable-rescue-media-creator.html

I've had to restore quite a few times over the years.
I've never had any problems using backup images, but I was never worried about the wait.
The nice part is that you can get into the disc image and look at stuff or pull out files that you need.


pbj:
Probably a good idea to replace all the capacitors and clearcoat the magnetic platters, too.

yotsuya:
I just back up the MAME/Hyperspin/AtomicFE setup on a portable Hard Drive and don't worry about the system (though I try to keep a backup of the drivers). Setting up Windows is the easy part.  :cheers:
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