So I realized that if my backup solution couldn't be run by a monkey, I (the aforementioned monkey) wouldn't actually have the discipline to make it happen ...

I've tried a lot of approaches to backing up for my home office network.  Ghost 10 is working great for full system recovery because it does scheduled, imaged based backups without having to exit Windows.  It also supports incremental backups, mounting of backups as drive letters and playing of backed up machine images via VMWare.  But, I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know.

What I needed for the home office was a blend of business and home data managment needs.  I wanted network attached storage and easy to manage offsite backup.  I have been looking at various NAS solutions for quite some time - even had two bad copies of the Buffalo LinkStation NAS device in for while (kept overheating).  Many of the NAS solutions required (or came) preformatted with file systems from UNIX - precluding the drive from being removed and attached directly to a Windows computer should the need arise.  Also the "simple" requirement of Gigabit ethernet is still a relatively premium feature in NAS devices.  Gigabit ethernet may seem like a luxury, but on network attached storage where you will be doing image backups or realtime browsing of photos (which causes thumbnail generation processes across the network) gigabit ethernet makes drives seem local while 100 Mbps is rather unworkable.  Finally, there are quite a few handy server processes I could run if it was actually a Windows machine doing this job for me.

Eventually it occurred to me that if I could have a mirrored (RAID 1) drive set, maybe I could swap one of the mirrored drives with an identical offsite drive.  The resync of the mirror would bring the offsite drive up to date.  Since I would be doing it only with a data volume, I would not be getting into any of the sticky issues of mirroring system or boot volumes.  I considered Windows RAID 1, but I was running this setup off a laptop using XP - so no dynamic disks means no Windows RAID.  I considered a hardware solution - an enclosure or NAS device - but many of them used either UNIX file systems or other technologies which would make it difficult or impossible to direct connect them to a Windows machine without reformatting.  I wanted to preserve a direct connect option if possible because this would be a large volume of data and I didn't want to be in for a lot of data shuffling to get the drives usable on Windows again.  In addition I'm not keen on being tied to some vendor's firmware, OS and product life cycle decisions.  I also wondered if the average RAID setup would really tolerate having multiple mirror partners within a single mirrored volume.  Even if I could convince it to rebuild, would it trigger a lengthy bit for bit rebuild of the mirrored drive?  For me, that was too many unknowns that I suspected would not end up being in favor of my desired solution.

Then I discovered MirrorFolder.  MirrorFolder has an incredible array of drive and folder synchronization functionality - one of it's modes is a software RAID 1.  Out of the box MirrorFolder supports the idea that a mirrored drive may have one or more drives to be mirrored to and that any given drive may or may not be online.  When an unsynchronized drive is reconnected, it goes to town syncing it up.  However, because the mirroring is not implemented at a level where it copies files to synchronize, it does not get fussy about every bit being in the identical position on the drive. 

When in RAID 1 mode, MirrorFolder duplicates I/O requests in memory and sends them to multiple drives.  And in case your wondering, this does include any IO requests generated by network mapped drives to your mirrored drive(s).  It also supports additional synchronization modes such as "Synchronize in Real-Time" - which does not duplicate IO requests, but monitors the drive/folder for changes and sync's up immediately.  It also supports recurring scheduled synchronization.  It runs as a service and file system driver, so no one needs to be logged in.  It does extensive file-by-file logging of all of it's activities.  It's fast and has very little overhead in RAID 1 mode.  RAID-1 mode also supports mirroring of open files such as databases or documents that are currently being worked on.  MirrorFolder also includes the ability to backup files that are being update or deleted - similar to a file version control system.  This can be pointed at a third drive location if desired and can zip files to save space.  Finally, even if doing RAID 1, you can specify that MirrorFolder filter out certain files or file types so MirrorFolder won't waste space and time keeping a bunch of temporary or cached files up to date (such as thumbnails).

Here is a list of the benefits of using MirrorFolder versus more traditional solutions:

• Drives do not need to be the same capacity.
• Drives do not need to be formatted for the same file system.
• Folder level synchronization.
• Mirror partners that are across a network.
• Multiple mirror partners.
• Drives can be direct connected to Windows at any time.
• Since the drives are independent in Windows, you can do a read only share to the mirror partner and direct read access to one drive and write acces to the "master".  This is also a down side in that the drives do not automatically become load balanced - the upside with MirrorFolder is that you can change the mirror configuration around and swap out one of the lesser used drives to be the primary from time to time.

MirrorFolder is a very reasonable $40 if you decide to buy it after using the fully functional trial.

So far this solution performs well, has the system flexibility I desire and most importantly - offsite backups are finally happening!

Visit Site Download Now (1.5 MB) 

If you have a Software RAID solution that you have found works well, drop me a line at Darwin at DesktopEngineer dot com.

Topic: Engineers Toolbox