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Using external hard drives

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2012 11:49 am
by Chris_I
Hello –
I am a home user and use Windows XP SP3 and AIS 3.0 on an increasingly elderly computer (one day to be upgraded).
I have four 1.4 Tb hard drives used as follows:
C with home pictures, music, and a large amount of other data; D with home video; these are both fixed internally. My two other (removable) hard drives are used for backups of one sort or another. These two are physically attached as external SATA drives in docks but my motherboard will only recognise them as internal drives.
I have created two main AIS backup jobs for the main C drive and use them alternately (one for each removable hard drive) so that I can keep one backup securely away from the computer and one in its dock ready to perform. When I remember (weekly in theory) I swap the two over.
However when I do the swap, AIS keeps saying it cannot find the backup, no doubt because if I change the drives over, the computer occasionally allocates the “new” drive a different drive letter.
Is there any way of using AIS to keep two or three hard drive backups rotating (as in the tutorial for USB drives)? I only get my other (USB) drives presented if I follow the instructions and these will not be suitable. (SATA is a slow job but USB takes even longer.)
Thanks –
Chris

Backing up to alternating destinations

Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2012 7:05 pm
by Barry
This backup may be converted into the external drive style backup. The external drive backup relies on the fact that each backup drive is given a unique volume name as the drive letter with which the drives connect cannot be pre-determined with any great success. A unique volume name however is easily found by AISBackup.

To convert the existing disk drive based backup select the job and attach at least one of the external drives. Then use the following menu options:

1: Manage Backup / Change Backup Job Settings

2: Destination Settings tab

3: Convert (to a multiple destination style backup job)

4: Check Open backup contents from backup media

5: Click Modify drive list

6: Using the <Select Drive> drop-down list select one of the external drives to which the backup is to be made, if the external drive is not listed (as on your system) click Show All Disks and try the drop-down again.

7: Select the disk to which the backup is to be made then click Add Drive. The disk name may also be typed in if the drive is not connected to the PC.

8: Click OK Then click OK.

9: The backup will now be made to which ever drive is connected, if more than one drive is connected the backup will be made to the drive containing the oldest backup. When running the job interactively you may choose the destination drive.

Barry

Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2012 10:12 pm
by Chris_I
Many thanks indeed barry -- just what I was looking for!
Very much appreciate your time and trouble.
Chris

Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2012 1:24 am
by nikkil
Nice to see this working for you Chris. What version are you using by the way?

Using external hard drives

Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2012 9:31 pm
by irwinc
My AIS version is 3.0.0.410
(And it still works OK!)
Chris

Re: Using external hard drives

Posted: Wed Mar 06, 2019 1:11 pm
by Chris_I
Not sure if you want this added to the earlier post or posted as new -
I have been happily using the method of backing up to several external drives in turn, with no problems. I now have a selection of external drives each used in turn, some more often than others. I'm hoping for some clarification and reassurance - by possibly asking a daft question.
It suddenly occurred to me that I have simply assumed that the whole backup is restorable up to the last dated backup on each external drive, and that each individual external disc will have enough data within itself, independent of all or any of the others, to restore everything present on my computer at that individual disc's last point in time.
However it's an important assumption. If by any chance I would need to produce more than one external disc to restore the whole thing, that would be a whole new scenario - one I am not prepared for.
(Of course if I wanted to go back to a specific earlier date I realise I could only use whatever earlier dates are present on any surviving external discs, but I am looking here not at that but rather at a disaster recovery - restoring from what might be only a single surviving disc.)
Many thanks

Chris

Re: Using external hard drives

Posted: Thu Mar 07, 2019 9:37 am
by Barry
Yes, each drive contains a full backup for each session made to it, you probably have 100’s of backup sessions you could restore from. If you have a spare disk drive you could confirm this by restoring one or more of these sessions to it. If the backup contains Windows then the restored partition will be added to the boot menu so you could, in theory, see what your computer looked like last year or the year before. I would not advise opening an e-mail client that deletes e-mails from the server or you may lose some new e-mails to the ‘old’ version of Windows.

Barry

Re: Using external hard drives

Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2019 5:29 pm
by Chris_I
Many thanks Barry. Just what I needed to know.
Chris
PS
On an unrelated topic, I can't get to the Forum page from the left hand menu, which produced an error message. You may well know this but just in case you didn't. (I tried both Chrome and Edge)

Re: Using external hard drives

Posted: Wed Mar 13, 2019 7:05 pm
by Barry
Thanks Chris, there were a few links to the updated forum that were not working.

Barry