Automated BTV Backup. And a Raid backup question.

[Cal]

We all know we can use the admin page, goto about and use the backup to capture a snapshot of BTV as it is at that moment.

So I thought I'd try something simple and see if it works. I had a look at Winrars command line options and this seems to work fine.

Create a bat file with the following lines and sched a task to run it once a week or so.

@echo off
cd\
cd C:\Program Files\WinRAR
rar a -agYYYY-MM-DD -m5 -r -ep1 -dh "\\Tower\backups\Auto BTV Backups\" "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\SnapStream\Beyond TV\*.*"

You need Winrar installed. and modify the save location to suite your needs.
There are 3 open files when BTV is running. The -dh switch allows open files to be read. The -ag is file name formatting. In this case the current date.

Doing a normal backup from the admin page gives me a zip file nearly twice the size of the rar. But decompressing them both shows all files accounted for and the correct sizes. (plus BTV does not need to shut down)

I haven't tested to see what happens when BTV is actually recording instead of sitting there idle. But not likely an issue since I'm only running this once a week when I know nothing is going on. If a file is comletely locked instead of mearly being open then rar will just skip it. Again not an issue for me as I'm mostly interested in this for making sure I always have a relatively current copy of the history file and thats not one of the locked files.

--------------

OK, now that the simple stuff is out of the way. Anyone know of a true image tool that can both backup and restore to a RAID? Most can backup a RAID partition but the small print says they can't restore to it.

My BTV box has 3 drives in a RAID 5 steup. There is a 10GB C: drive and the rest is for Vids on the D: drive.

I'm looking for something that can backup the above C: drive and be able to restore back to it. but since its all the same RAID5 underneath a lot of the software I've looked at will not do the restore part.

I could get around this issue by putting in a separate drive thats not part of the Raid but I'd rather not have to. I like the C being part of the Raid. That way if it fails I lose no data at all. If its separate then I may loose some history or changes within BTV since the last backup.

[Killer Bob]

Acronis -- will make an image and find the raid drivers to make a bootable CD. Easy to use.

[Cal]

I thought I had looked at that one. I'll have another look.

[koan00]

I think as long as you have a Windows Setup compatible driver floppy, it should work.

[Jakesty]

Ghost says it doesn't support RAID backups, but depending on the type of RAID you have in place it works. I have used the old GHOST program, 8.0, to backup and restore our Compaq Server. It worked just fine.