Protecting against hard drive failure – Ghost Drives









There are three certainties in life – Taxes, Death, and the fact that every hard drive will eventually fail. There are three strategies I thoroughly recommend for minimising the devastation that a drive failure could cause to your operation:

1: Regular backup of project files.
2: Ghost Clone of system drive.
3: Redundancy protection of media.

In this article we’ll cover #2 (in future newsletters well tackle the others).

Setting up a computer as a non-linear edit system can be a fairly complex software installation process. Because it’s desirable to have new features and best performance, there are likely to be cutting-edge (read as first generation and sometimes buggy) technology aspects to the software, hardware, or both. Having set up your computer with the correct operating system and applications, drivers have needed to be installed and optimised, user preferences determined, and possibly software patches installed to resolve certain issues.

If your system hard drive completely failed tomorrow morning you would need a coffee (or something stronger!) and quite likely a day or two in which to install a new (blank) hard drive, and systematically set about rebuilding your system from scratch. Of course you’d need to find all your source software, install it in the right order, relocate the readme files and download the patches that fixed key issues. As you could no longer run your failed drive you’d be setting up a similar configuration by memory, and it’s likely that in the days that followed you would find various things that had been forgotten, or that weren’t set up the same way.

Of course you’d also have lost all your project data – but for the sake of this article I’m assuming you’ve been backing this up regularly, so once you had built a new system drive you would be able to restore your work.

It’s Murphy’s Law that hard drives usually wait until you have a pressing deadline, and then they fail. The chances are that you don’t have a couple of days in which to rebuild your failed drive, and that your project will fall behind schedule, your editor and director will continue to invoice you for the time you’ve booked them, and the phone will start ringing from the network, asking when the next cut will be delivered.

There is another way – you could be operational again within an hour after a complete system drive failure had occurred. The strategy involves the insurance of making a clone or ‘ghost’ of your system drive (while it’s working fine) onto another hard drive, and then putting this ghost on the shelf. If your system drive fails then it can be exchanged for the ghost, you can restore your backed up project files, and work can continue.

Having a ghost drive also provides other advantages –

  • Software and hardware are forever being improved by manufacturers, however sometimes an improvement in one area creates a problem in another. It’s not unusual for a new hardware driver to conflict with software, or for a new software release to fix 10 bugs, but introduce 3 more. If the ghost drive is made before the update is done, then if a serious problem is found it is possible to ‘roll back’ by changing to the ghost. This technique has saved huge amounts of lost time for quite a number of our clients, and we now strongly advocate doing it before any significant upgrade is done to an edit system.
  • Another area of vulnerability for system drives is viruses and corrupted data. Again having a strategically made ghost drive can be an invaluable recovery technique if a catastrophe happens.

    • Some strategic considerations -

  • PC and Mac computers require different techniques for making ghost clones. We recommend that a second hard drive of the same size and type be used for the ghost – this enables it to physically replace the system drive if needed.
  • A ghost clone should be made at a time when you’re happy with the way the computer is setup and operating, as this is the configuration that the ghost would return you to.
  • It’s a very good idea for a log to be kept of what date the ghost was made, and what changes have been made to the computer since.
  • Once you’ve successfully upgraded your system to a later software version and all is running well, it’s worth remaking the ghost so that it reflects the new state of your computer.
  • Ghosting is not a substitute for backing up your data. The purpose of the ghost is to be able to restore the system in the event of a problem, any project data on the ghost will almost certainly be out of date as it relates back to the date that the ghost was made (probably several months previously). It is still vital to backup project data on a daily basis.
  • This discussion has centred around edit suites, but ghost drives are very helpful for any system-critical computer system that would cause major disruption if its system drive failed (graphics, servers, accounting, administration).

    • If you would like to discuss ghost drive protection for your system please give us a call.