PCA Forums

I have been asked to set up a couple systems used for Point of Sale, with touch screens, receipt printers, and CC machines. My question is about backing up. They want to be able to backup everything and to make it very easy to bring it back up in case of a crash.

My idea was to have two hard drives in each machine and to use Ghost to mirror one HD to the other every night. That way if they ever lose one HD all that has to be done is to go into the BIOS and switch to booting from the second drive. I'm assuming that the backup Ghost makes would automatically be bootable....correct?

I have also been thinking of using RAID 1. Would it be as simple to switch from one HD to the other via the BIOS using RAID?

Simplicity is key here. Money is no biggie.

Any other ideas?

Software RAID is not all that practical - if the primary fails it's not a smooth transition to the backup. The 2nd drive needs to be re-jumpered as the primary and the the BOOT.INI modified to allow it to be bootable.

Hardware RAID is better - like a Promise controller. The system automatically continues to work just fine on the remaining drive and the RAID monitoring software notifies you that one drive has failed. Just swap out the bad drive and you have a mirror again.

HOWEVER even with a RAID array you STILL need to backup your data every night and make occasional Ghost images. There are situations where you could have data corruption that affects both drives (virus, accidental erasure, soft sector corruption).


You certainly could Ghost the system every night. You might want to sit down and write a batch file to do it unless there's someone there who's a techie.

HOWEVER I really don't see the point in ghosting EVERY NIGHT. The only thing that will change daily is the data, especially on a POS system.

What I generally do for my clients is Ghost their mission critical systems every 3 months or so, but setup their system to backup their data nightly (to CD, Floppy, Zip Disk, tape, whatever). No need to make a Ghost image any more often then that unless you install a software update, update drivers, or make settings changes.

Just do a RAID 1. Set them both to master on single device cables on the RAID controller. If one drive fails, everything's on the other. All you have to do is change the hdd boot sequence in the RAID BIOS. It's a piece of cake and worry free.

I discovered that the the POS software uses backoffice to backup across the network automatically. As FP mentioned the only changes on each system would be the daily sales data, so having 2 hard drives would be a little redundant.

I'll set up a central server to take care of all the backups and the occasional Ghost.

Thanks guys!