Using An entire Drive for backup?

[LuckyAsFox]

I want to back up ALL my data, Any videos, games, drives everything. Do I buy a 5T WD blue and use some software to clone my two separate drives (one drive to store all my games and the other to store apps my OS and videos) into that one 5T drive? So if something goes wrong I have the 5T drive with everything on it exactly the same as before.

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That might be cheaper (and possibly easier) than two separate drives, and it's more flexible too which is good in case the ratio of what you need to store changes.  Only downside I can see is if that drive goes, you lose the whole backup rather than having your eggs in multiple baskets, so to speak, but I think that probably cancels out with the fact that one drive is less likely to fail than two.

[LuckyAsFox]

2 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

That might be cheaper (and possibly easier) than two separate drives, and it's more flexible too which is good in case the ratio of what you need to store changes.  Only downside I can see is if that drive goes, you lose the whole backup rather than having your eggs in multiple baskets, so to speak, but I think that probably cancels out with the fact that one drive is less likely to fail than two.

So I can clone my SSD with the OS, applications, drivers and videos and my 1T hard drive with all my games into a 5T hard drive that will keep on adding as I install new games/applications and stuff?

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3 minutes ago, LuckyAsFox said:

So I can clone my SSD with the OS, applications, drivers and videos and my 1T hard drive with all my games into a 5T hard drive that will keep on adding as I install new games/applications and stuff?

With the right software, yes, I don't see why not.  There's a few ways you could do this, but if you want to preserve the OS with installed programs, you'll need an actual disk image and not just a copy of the files.  Doing this should work fine.  If however your program wants to mirror the drive and basically turn the 5 TB HDD into a copy of the SSD, then it's not going to work since that will conflict with doing any other backup to it in the same manner.

[LuckyAsFox]

5 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

With the right software, yes, I don't see why not.  There's a few ways you could do this, but if you want to preserve the OS with installed programs, you'll need an actual disk image and not just a copy of the files.  Doing this should work fine.  If however your program wants to mirror the drive and basically turn the 5 TB HDD into a copy of the SSD, then it's not going to work since that will conflict with doing any other backup to it in the same manner.

So I can only copy one drive, either my games on my 1T hard drive or my os and applications on my ssd. Is that what you're saying? Sorry, I'm not familiar with this stuff.

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3 minutes ago, LuckyAsFox said:

So I can only copy one drive, either my games on my 1T hard drive or my os and applications on my ssd. Is that what you're saying? Sorry, I'm not familiar with this stuff.

Depends how it's done.  If they're copied as images, which would make the most sense imo, then it should work fine.  You could copy any number of drives as long as there's space.  But if you copy them in a way that just mirrors the contents, then of course that will only work for one drive.

[LuckyAsFox]

1 minute ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Depends how it's done.  If they're copied as images, which would make the most sense imo, then it should work fine.  You could copy any number of drives as long as there's space.  But if you copy them in a way that just mirrors the contents, then of course that will only work for one drive.

How big are images? Do I a full 5T for images and are there any downsides to imaging a drive rather than cloning?

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3 minutes ago, LuckyAsFox said:

How big are images? Do I a full 5T for images and are there any downsides to imaging a drive rather than cloning?

That is a good question.  Theoretically a very "dumb" image would be the size of the drive you are taking an image of, but I don't think most systems work like that these days (or maybe they never did).  Worst case, it would be some seemingly random size, larger than the used space but (likely) smaller than the total capacity, and this would be a number that you could potentially decrease by defragmenting.  Best case, it would actually be less than the total used space as the image would be compressed in some way.  My money would be on a middle ground where the image is roughly equal to the used space though - smart enough to not store empty space but not going so far as to compress anything.

 

The main downsides are that you would have to mount the image to browse and extract individual files from it, and depending on the format you might not actually be able to do this at all, meaning the only way to get a file out is to get them all - ie, write the image to a drive.  But, if you only ever plan to recover the whole thing or nothing, this wouldn't be an issue.  Another downside, at least as I see it, is the files would be truly enormous - over a TB perhaps, depending on how big the drives you are backing up are.  In reality this is perhaps a non-issue but it does make me a little uncomfortable as I've never worked with anything over the dozens of GB range.

[LuckyAsFox]

11 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

That is a good question.  Theoretically a very "dumb" image would be the size of the drive you are taking an image of, but I don't think most systems work like that these days (or maybe they never did).  Worst case, it would be some seemingly random size, larger than the used space but (likely) smaller than the total capacity, and this would be a number that you could potentially decrease by defragmenting.  Best case, it would actually be less than the total used space as the image would be compressed in some way.  My money would be on a middle ground where the image is roughly equal to the used space though - smart enough to not store empty space but not going so far as to compress anything.

 

The main downsides are that you would have to mount the image to browse and extract individual files from it, and depending on the format you might not actually be able to do this at all, meaning the only way to get a file out is to get them all - ie, write the image to a drive.  But, if you only ever plan to recover the whole thing or nothing, this wouldn't be an issue.  Another downside, at least as I see it, is the files would be truly enormous - over a TB perhaps, depending on how big the drives you are backing up are.  In reality this is perhaps a non-issue but it does make me a little uncomfortable as I've never worked with anything over the dozens of GB range.

Ummm. A bit confused xD. So if I had a full 1T drive and I imaged it onto another drive how big would it be approximately,? and how would I use my image I stored on my backup drive to restore my corrupt main drive?

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1 minute ago, LuckyAsFox said:

Ummm. A bit confused xD. So if I had a full 1T drive and I imaged it onto another drive how big would it be approximately,? and how would I use my image I stored on my backup drive to restore my corrupt main drive?

if the drive was 1 TB and full of data, the image would be about 1 TB.  You would use the same software that created it in order to restore the data to a new drive, if and when necessary.  Depending on the format, it may be possible to use other software as well, if it's a generic and common format rather than something proprietary.

[LuckyAsFox]

1 minute ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

if the drive was 1 TB and full of data, the image would be about 1 TB.  You would use the same software that created it in order to restore the data to a new drive, if and when necessary.  Depending on the format, it may be possible to use other software as well, if it's a generic and common format rather than something proprietary.

But isn't imaging compressing data down or something?

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1 minute ago, LuckyAsFox said:

But isn't imaging compressing data down or something?

It might, depending on the software.  If it does, there's two things to keep in mind:

1. To get any appreciable level of compression, it will take even a powerful CPU a fairly long time to compress or extract 1 TB of data, so backups and recovery would be quite slow
2. Different types of data compress to different degrees.  Uncompressed data like BMP images, WAV files, and other "sparse" formats like EXEs will likely compress ok or even quite well.  Formats that are already compressed and thus very "dense", like jpg, png, mp3, etc. will barely compress at all - a percent or two at most, and potentially there will be even no change, or a slight increase in size.

[LuckyAsFox]

8 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

It might, depending on the software.  If it does, there's two things to keep in mind:

1. To get any appreciable level of compression, it will take even a powerful CPU a fairly long time to compress or extract 1 TB of data, so backups and recovery would be quite slow
2. Different types of data compress to different degrees.  Uncompressed data like BMP images, WAV files, and other "sparse" formats like EXEs will likely compress ok or even quite well.  Formats that are already compressed and thus very "dense", like jpg, png, mp3, etc. will barely compress at all - a percent or two at most, and potentially there will be even no change, or a slight increase in size.

Alright thx, I understand now, Appreciate your time.

[Pyramiden]

Don't forget that this type of backup will not work in 100% of the cases when the disk is always connected to your PC. If you get infected with a cryptolocker, for example, your backup will also be encrypted.

You could get an external USB enclosure with a power button, that you will only switch on when you make a backup.

[LuckyAsFox]

16 minutes ago, Pyramiden said:

Don't forget that this type of backup will not work in 100% of the cases when the disk is always connected to your PC. If you get infected with a cryptolocker, for example, your backup will also be encrypted.

You could get an external USB enclosure with a power button, that you will only switch on when you make a backup.

Can't I just disconnect the hard drive in the bios and it won't let affected? 

[Pyramiden]

1 hour ago, LuckyAsFox said:

Can't I just disconnect the hard drive in the bios and it won't let affected? 

Probably. But I find pressing a button easier than disabling a device in my BIOS. Although I understand that an external enclosure can be annoying if you want to keep things looking clean. 

[LuckyAsFox]

5 minutes ago, Pyramiden said:

Probably. But I find pressing a button easier than disabling a device in my BIOS. Although I understand that an external enclosure can be annoying if you want to keep things looking clean. 

I am trying to go for a really clean build so I'll just disable it in my bios and it should be fine. But thx anyway