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#46
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O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)
Mark Twain wrote:
I wanted to run something by you and see if you think theres's any problem with it or if it's OK. This is in the near future,.. Instead of removing the 8500 HD and installing the WD to clone the new HD. I want to clone the new HD with the 8500 O/S and then make a Mrimg folder and create a mrimg for it after cloning. Then when I do my monthly Mrimgs I do Mrimgs for both the WD and for the new external back-up and also do the 780 mrimgs with its own dedicated external HD. What do you think? Robert Normally, you're backing up data that has changed. The backup drives should hold (mainly) backups. Now, if your internal drive was running out of room, and you needed to add a second hard drive inside the machine, then you might want to include that in your backup set to the external drive. I can't tell from your description, whether you're backing up a backup drive (to make a second copy) or what you're up to. If you wanted "redundancy", you can copy a freshly made MRIMG on one external drive, to a second external drive, as a form of insurance. Macrium (Copy) Internal ------- External Drive #1 ---- External Drive #2 But generally, any "multiplication" of backups is a mistake. I've tried this before, and it rapidly gets out of hand. (For example, I've had backups stored on my internal drive, which during emergency data recovery operations, have cost me time handling them.) It's best to make a fresh backup from whatever you consider the "source" of the data, any time you want to store on an external, and try to avoid if possible, making backups of backups. Because it's harder to get rid of those doubly-backed up things later. From experience, I can tell you that if you aren't careful with how you handle generations of backups, on Tuesday you buy a 1TB drive, on Wednesday you buy a 2TB drive, on Thursday you buy a 4TB drive, on Friday you buy a 8TB drive. And you begin to realize "hey, this looks like addiction" :-) So if you notice you're constantly running out of room, there's a good chance you've been making backups of backups. It balloons rapidly when you do that. It's taken me days of data transfers, to clean those sorts of messes up. (I stopped at 4TB.) It's OK to, say, alternate drives from week to week. Macrium Week1 -------- External Drive #1 Week2 -------- External Drive #2 Week3 -------- External Drive #1 Week4 -------- External Drive #2 What that pattern does, is if Drive #1 fails or is flaky and you didn't notice, maybe the internal drive fails one day, you reach for Drive #1 and it's bad too. In such a case, Drive #2 has backups that might be a little older or a little newer. The only reason to rotate more drives than that into the picture, is if you're running out of space or something. Now, I have two computers and twenty drives. Is that an addiction or bad planning ? or what ? :-) I have enough drives, I keep a folder that just has lists of files on each hard drive. To try to manage them. Paul |
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#47
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O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)
Here's what I'm up to; following your advise,
I'm trying to take advantage of the availability of good quality HD's while still available. Especially since all new computers, even the refurbished models come with Windows 10 so I'm trying to stock up while I can to keep the 8500 up and running and on Win 7 Professional. It's not a matter of upgrading in size or running out of space, 2TB suits me fine, (In fact I have 788 GB of free space on my 1TB on the 8500) It's a case of maintaining what I have. I just thought why not have a second back-up for the WD (Mrimgs) because if I loose that drive I loose all my Mrimgs. So I could just copy the Mrimg folder from one drive to another and then continue from that point. and/or I could just buy the HD's and leave them in their boxes. At present I have (2) spare cloned HD's for the 8500. My thought was to buy a total of (3) more HD's, (1) for the WD(Mrimg) backup and (2) for spare cloned HD's for the 780 that I'll all put back in their boxes after cloning except the WD backup for Mrimgs. Thoughts/Suggestions? Robert |
#48
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O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)
Another thing that crossed my mind was
the power supply. As I remember you were able to find me one for the 8200. So I'm wondering if I should consider getting another power supply for the 8500 and 780? Could you point me to what I would need if they still make it? or should I worry? Thanks, Robert |
#49
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O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)
Mark Twain wrote:
Another thing that crossed my mind was the power supply. As I remember you were able to find me one for the 8200. So I'm wondering if I should consider getting another power supply for the 8500 and 780? Could you point me to what I would need if they still make it? or should I worry? Thanks, Robert One hint on power supplies, is the colors on the wiring harness. You may find that the 20 pin pattern of the one in the 8200, doesn't match the 8500 or the 780. It could be that the 8200 had the proprietary wire colors on the 20 pin main connector. If you plugged a standard supply in there, something might pop as a result. Whereas Dell eventually saw the light, and moved to using standard supplies. In which case, there's no reason to panic about finding a substitute. The colors are in the spec. Spec 1.3 has the 20 pin connector. http://www.formfactors.org/developer...X12V_1_3dg.pdf Spec 2.2 introduces the 24 pin connector. The 20 pin and the 24 pin share colors, and when doing so, pin 1 aligns with pin 1 on the other one. http://www.formfactors.org/developer...public_br2.pdf A disturbing trend on modern supplies, is the shift to all-black wiring. This makes it harder to do debugging, if looking inside a case. The color scheme the standard uses, is really useful, even for end users. In terms of size, two dimensions are standard. The third dimension "length" of the supply can vary quite a bit. Supplies with high power output, are longer. Other supplies, can actually manage to be a tiny bit shorter than the original. The two dimensions that are standard, help hold the supply in place. The mechanical support and the drill pattern need to match, to make them easy to swap. Some supplies come with switches on the back and others don't. Some supplies are fixed voltage, while the majority today should be autoswitching. I think the Sparkle supply I bought for the old computer, it has a slide switch to select between 110V and 220V. But many others take care of that for you. So compare the table which gives colors for the main power connector, and compare it to what you see plugged into the motherboard. And that will tell you whether there is any reason to get excited or not. Finding one of those custom Dell ones now, it would probably be a Chinese one. Whereas years ago, PCPowerAndCooling had a nice line of those things (Dell custom). It's possible finding one for the 8200 would be a challenge. But nothing prevents an enterprising user from taking a removal tool, pulling the pins out of the shell, and moving the wires around. Paul |
#50
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O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)
Mark Twain wrote:
Here's what I'm up to; following your advise, I'm trying to take advantage of the availability of good quality HD's while still available. Especially since all new computers, even the refurbished models come with Windows 10 so I'm trying to stock up while I can to keep the 8500 up and running and on Win 7 Professional. It's not a matter of upgrading in size or running out of space, 2TB suits me fine, (In fact I have 788 GB of free space on my 1TB on the 8500) It's a case of maintaining what I have. I just thought why not have a second back-up for the WD (Mrimgs) because if I loose that drive I loose all my Mrimgs. So I could just copy the Mrimg folder from one drive to another and then continue from that point. and/or I could just buy the HD's and leave them in their boxes. At present I have (2) spare cloned HD's for the 8500. My thought was to buy a total of (3) more HD's, (1) for the WD(Mrimg) backup and (2) for spare cloned HD's for the 780 that I'll all put back in their boxes after cloning except the WD backup for Mrimgs. Thoughts/Suggestions? Robert If you're doing a disk-to-disk file copy, you can do that from file explorer. You don't have to do all file operations as clones. Copying is OK once in a while, and definitely makes sense when copying the backup you make tomorrow, from one external drive to a second external drive. If you want all the drives to be bootable in an emergency, then you can clone the part that boots. (In Disk Management, you see the words "System", "Boot", "Active", marking the things you want to clone to make the disk bootable). So I suppose the answer is yes, you can use Cloning as the first step, but when new backups are added to one drive, you can just copy the MRIMG file to a second drive. Paul |
#51
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O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)
I do want all the drives to be bootable
and will take your advice and use file explorer to move the Mrimg files from one external HD to another Here's my 8500 and 780 power supply/wiring 8500: http://i67.tinypic.com/2nimjc5.jpg http://i65.tinypic.com/j9r7rc.jpg 780: http://i65.tinypic.com/2i67lx.jpg Robert |
#52
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O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)
All black wires? That is a disturbing
trend,.. why in the world would they do such a thing? That totally defies common sense. Colored wires tell you what is what. Robert |
#53
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O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)
Mark Twain wrote:
I do want all the drives to be bootable and will take your advice and use file explorer to move the Mrimg files from one external HD to another Here's my 8500 and 780 power supply/wiring 8500: http://i67.tinypic.com/2nimjc5.jpg http://i65.tinypic.com/j9r7rc.jpg 780: http://i65.tinypic.com/2i67lx.jpg Robert I'm not sure I'm focused on the right thing on the 780. At least a portion of the 8500 connector appears to align with the color sequence. https://s14.postimg.cc/ksc81jhlt/mai...or_24_pins.jpg Paul |
#54
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O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)
Mark Twain wrote:
All black wires? That is a disturbing trend,.. why in the world would they do such a thing? That totally defies common sense. Colored wires tell you what is what. Robert It goes along with filling the computer with colored LEDs and having an acrylic or tempered glass door, so you can "look at the guts". It's for the kids that never had an aquarium tank when they were younger :-) You can see the all-black wires of the main power connector, underneath the two hoses coming from the CPU. The CPU has a "water block". The two hoses lead to the "radiator" on the right. By making the wires all-black, the wire colors don't "distract" from whatever the important stuff is supposed to be in there. And the CPU likely has a water block so it will look "pretty" or something. https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/zS...CikDV2Lyed.jpg Paul |
#55
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O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)
That's still crazy,.. why not just have the
wires with black covers like they have for car wiring. Robert |
#56
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O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)
How about these for the 780:
http://i64.tinypic.com/fypw8.jpg http://i66.tinypic.com/e7mcef.jpg Robert |
#57
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O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)
Mark Twain wrote:
How about these for the 780: http://i64.tinypic.com/fypw8.jpg http://i66.tinypic.com/e7mcef.jpg Robert In the second picture, on top, I see orange orange black red black red black so that much, so far, is standard. Using the table I put in my previous picture, you can simply walk your finger down the colored wires in the shell and verify the colors using the table. The connectors will either be 20 pin or 24 pin, and the four pin section on the end of the 24 pin, is the unique part. There is a 20 pin subset on the 24 pin, so the two connectors are "almost the same". And they only added a single wire for each of three rails on the end of the 24 pin, to increase the amperage the harness could carry. There should be more pictures of PC wiring, on the playtool site. If you need a reference. http://www.playtool.com/pages/psucon...onnectors.html "The Dell PCs which were carrying this ticking time-bomb were made between 1996 and 2000. If you're replacing a Dell power supply from this era then you should call Dell and make sure it's not a proprietary design." So according to the guy who runs that site, it's a time before the 780 and 8500 existed, so your power supplies should be standard ones (at least in terms of "blowing stuff up"). You still have to keep your wits about you, if there are things like auxiliary connectors. http://www.playtool.com/pages/psucon.../auxthings.jpg Occasionally, I see those being used in older computers. I have PSUs here with that connector, but the connector doesn't get used. If you were buying a supply for an older computer, you'd check whether that one is present and in usage too. There's actually all sorts of trivia for supplies, but most of it is for EATX and server motherboards. Connectors that fit and can blow stuff up, and so on. Good fun. The little Dell fiasco is one of the few significant ones for desktop systems, and it was... long ago. Paul |
#58
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O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)
Mark Twain wrote:
That's still crazy,.. why not just have the wires with black covers like they have for car wiring. Robert Style is apparently everything in this business. But if you see any discussion threads about this stuff, most people think the manufacturers are nuts. The manufacturers think they've invented hula hoops. And their customers are yawning. So there's a bit of a disconnect between what the manufacturers are trying to do, and what's important to customers. Paul |
#59
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O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)
This is way over my head,.. I
wouldn't know what to buy even if I figured out the wires/connectors. That's why I was hoping you could just point me to something. I didn't realize it was so involved. However, you said not to worry about power supplies, correct? Robert |
#60
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O.T. Mrimg backups, clones, restore images step by step (Paul)
Well I guess in some ways it's expected
because the gaming industry was responsible for much of the advances in computers so it only follows they would make 'fish tanks' etc out of them for visual appeal. It still makes no practical sense though. It's difficult enough with colored wires! Robert |
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