[Techtalk] Prodigal daughter and dual boot woes

[Conor Daly]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 10:11:20PM -0700 or thereabouts, Amanda Haynes wrote:
> Good evening everyone!
> 
> Just a quick intro since I'm newish - I am returning to Linuxchix after a
> decade long absence :( 

Welcome back!
I didn't think there had _been_ a decade of Linuxchix to have an absence
from!

> something (I'm totally alone here) - is disable RAID.  I know, duh, right?

I suspect that disabling RAID is going to require a reinstall of Vista.
Unless the hardware raid is a genuine RAID 1 implementation where each disk
is useable without a raid driver at all.  You might try popping one of the
disks into a non-raid machine and see can it be read.  Actually, can any of
the Live CDs read the individual disks?  

> to "just work").  Then I can still back stuff up to the second hard drive.
> And to DVDs.  And to an external drive.  And to a 3rd party online
> storage... you get the idea.

This might be a more robust solution than the raid in that it will allow you
to revert mistaken deletes without going to your external backup while under
RAID a mistaken delete is faithfully duplicated to the second drive.

For versioned mirroring you could look at rsync-diff (IIRC) which does
snapshots using minimal extra space for each version.
 
> Thoughts?  Ideas on how to automate my backups?  I'm sure there's some
> software out there that will do it for me :)  Good virtualization software?

At home, I use a home-grown version of rsync-diff to backup the entire
network to a versioned external HD.  At work, I use mondoarchive (
http://www.mondorescue.org ) to do nightly backups of my desktop (fedora 9)
to one of our servers.  mondo does multiple OS backups and does bare-metal
restores, even coping pretty well with different hardware (for when your
machine burns rather than just loses a disk).  It does backups to CD, DVD,
hard disk, remote server via NFS and SMB (windows networking).  It can
handle windows filesystems as well as linux ones so your Vista gets backed
up too.
 
Conor
-- 
Conor Daly,                   
Met Eireann, Glasnevin Hill,  
Dublin 9, Ireland             
Ph +3531 8064276 Fax +3531 8064247

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