Backing up cabinet hard drives

[LeedsFan]

This may be a rather basic question, but I've never actually done this before they way I'm thinking and part of it has confused me. I already have back ups of all my cabs hard drives in disc image format. It's a good job I did because one of the drives died on me this weekend (at an exhibition as well  ) and I'd have a hell of a job trying to remember or reconfigure everything exactly as it was.

So my question is this.... is it possible for me to build up a backup drive that is partitioned around 6 times with each partition having a plug and play ready backup of a cabinet? So basically this weekend I could have plugged in such a drive and have the BIOS boot from partition 3 for example?  The only issue that concerns me is that wouldn't each partition have to be labelled as a :C/ drive? But then how do you distinguish between each partition in the BIOS?

This may seem very simple to some people but I just want to ensure I'm doing it right. Or can I even do it this way?

[EvilNuff]

I'm not sure why you would want to do this?  If the drive physically fails it doesn't matter if there are additional partitions...you are better off buying 2 cheaper drives and just backing up onto a separate drive entirely.

[BlueGhost]

Look into dual booting, its usually used to change between different OSes on the same PC.  GRUB boot loader might work for this, instead of using it to switch between Windows and Linux you would be using it to pick the OS that matches the machine your are booting.

[DeLuSioNal29]

What I've done in the past is to set up the cabinet hard drive first with everything that you want.  Then use a COMPLETELY separate drive and CLONE the first hard drive.  Once it's done, put the cloned drive away.

True story of how this saved me:  I had family and friends over for a Superbowl party and as Murphy's law would have it, my drive died the morning of the event.  I simply swapped in the cloned backup drive and BAM!  I was back in business!

Most hard drive manufacturers have free software on their website for Disk Utilities that will clone your hard drive.  Just make sure you know which is which when cloning!  You don't want to clone the empty drive to the cabinet drive.  Easy way to avoid this is to buy hard drives of different sizes so that you will not be confused in the menus.

D

[pbj]

Dead hard drive = excuse to redo everything

Backups are for people stuck in their ways.

[DisFanJen]

Assuming a PC mainboard setup...

If the mainboard can handle it you could always set it up with basic raid (or buy a cheap raid card, ones that do mirroring are cheap as chips nowadays).  Just go with morroring and then if one drive dies it'll keep running in degraded mode, then you just swap out the bad one and it'll rebuild the raid.

Another option is to do a basic backup.  All O/S have a method of doing this and depending on how much you need to back up you could just run it it off on to a memory stick (say if it's just the configuration you want to save).

I may be a noob at this arcade cabinet stuff but PCs are my thing.

[LeedsFan]

I'm not sure why you would want to do this?  If the drive physically fails it doesn't matter if there are additional partitions...you are better off buying 2 cheaper drives and just backing up onto a separate drive entirely.

I have six different machines. So basically if I had 1 backup drive with me that covered all six machines and one went down (like this weekend) I could plug the backup drive in and have that machine back up and running.

Yes I could have a separate cloned drive for each machine but that means buying 6 or more hard drives and lug them all about if I take the machines anywhere. If I could I'd like to have just one drive that covered them all.

[BlueGhost]

Here's another thought, portion your hard drives so that is one drive for data and one drive for the OS.  Set it up so that the data drive is the same on each machine, then back up the data portion to a USB hard drive.  Then back up each machines OS partition to USB thumb drives.  So you would have one 32 GB (or 16 GB if you could slim your OS down that much) thump drive for each machine and only one large drive for backup to hold a backup of the data pool.

[EvilNuff]

I have six different machines. So basically if I had 1 backup drive with me that covered all six machines and one went down (like this weekend) I could plug the backup drive in and have that machine back up and running.

Yes I could have a separate cloned drive for each machine but that means buying 6 or more hard drives and lug them all about if I take the machines anywhere. If I could I'd like to have just one drive that covered them all.

Ahh, now I understand.  You shouldn't need to bother with partitions at all.  You can take a compressed image of the drives and store that as an image file on any OS/system/drive/etc.

[lilshawn]

buy a spare hard drive and one of these:

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX53975

i have this one... easy peasy press a button ... clone... and done. don't even need a computer to do it.