Anyone any experience with creating a ghost backup of SCADA?

[danatomega]

You can make bootable media for the Paragon Drive Copy, but after a trial install and copy from within win-7 we decided it was not affecting the system at all so we left it.

 

[The Plc Kid]

Thanks Kid, appreciate your experience in this. Can't convert to VM though due to needing serial support. However, will have a look at Storage Craft Shadow Protect.

Ok but just as an FYI for everyone you can use serial ports in VM's in multiple ways. I have 9 different legacy applications here that are now VM's and use serial ports in the Hosts or Serial port servers over a network connection so don't let that hold you back.

 

[TheWaterboy]

I use one of these devices to copy the drives at the hardware level and then much like jawolthuis I put a spare in the same box. Of course that only gets me so far, I have to backup the data differently and make sure activations aren't tied to the HD serial.

I would love to have a bootable USB stick that would allow me to clone a drive image to a portable drive and back to a new disk, but I haven't seen that work with Paragon or Acronis, both of which I own, and because of its potential misuse, support wont help make it happen. I know its possible, Most likely with Clonezilla, but I never spent enough time to figure out how.

I need to clone IDE HD's from IDE to C/F in the worst way.

 

[mk42]

You will also have to consider, is that new PC compatible with Windows XP? Many new PCs have hardware where drivers for XP are not available. Simply moving the "image" from PC "A" to PC "B" may trigger Windows to install drivers as it detects different hardware. It could even cause the dreaded "Blue-Screen-of-Death".

It is not always possible to just move from one PC to another without a lot more work (read up on the Microsoft Sysprep utility). I like the idea of just having a spare hard drive ready to go that I could plug back into the same PC.

This is a point that is worth repeating. A computer image should be used when you have an identical spare available or orderable. If you are installing it on a different computer, the results will be questionable, and errors might not show up immediately.

With most Industrial PC (IPC) vendors, they can guarantee compatibility into the future for at least a few years. With Dells and other consumer computers, you might get a different motherboard if you buy the same thing 6 months down the road.

When I've done this with PCs that run Rockwell Software activations (both FactoryTalk and EVRSI), they have been retained with no problems. I can't speak about Siemens activations.

I think most company's activations will carry over, the trick is if you are using one image to clone multiple PC's. If you are cloning the license along with it, it may WORK, but it puts you in a fuzzy place, legally. I think many manufactures have site/volume licenses available, where you can manage the legalities without worrying about software activation. I'm sure it takes the right customer, of course. Site license for a customer buying 1? Probably not. For 100? maybe.

 

[SourceGin]

ghost backup of SCADA?

Ghost is a good solution for Initial backup Image of SCADA machines , I've used it for 15 years But the scada Machine Software had to be Stopped and restarted for Incremental backups i use AOMEI Backupper Standard Edition 2.0.2 now it's free, and works on XP 7/8

 

[Dravik]

I use Ghost, Acronis, good old DD(linux box that won't play nicely w/ the others), and in a previous life BackupExec.
I also have a standalone drive cloner as mentioned above.

For the bootable ones, I prefer Acronis over Ghost/BackupExec. It handles UEFI better than the other in my experience.

Activation wise, It depends on what the software activates against. Some will use the HD serial number, diff HD, probably reactivation. Some use the MAC addy of the main nic, same as above, but you can install a virtual NIC to get around an immediate reactivation.

 

[The Plc Kid]

I would love to have a bootable USB stick that would allow me to clone a drive image to a portable drive and back to a new disk, but I haven't seen that work with Paragon or Acronis, both of which I own, and because of its potential misuse, support wont help make it happen. I know its possible, Most likely with Clonezilla, but I never spent enough time to figure out how.

I need to clone IDE HD's from IDE to C/F in the worst way.

This is very easily done using to bootable media of most of these programs. I know Acronis used to do it and likely still does as well as Paragon. I use shadow protect bootable media so nothing to install and I run it from a USB stick and save the backup to a USB external hard drive (pocket size) then save the file to my NAS storage block later.

 

[TheWaterboy]

ISTR that all of them wanted to be installed on the media being backed up. That wont work on the *nix boxes and I dont want it on the Windoze boxes. What does your Shadow Protect cost you?

 

[Operaghost]

Yeah, I use Ghost 2003 and a CD/DVD or USB drive is all that is needed. Nothing has to be installed on the source or target machines.

Installing it on my own PC can be useful to aid in creating the boot media. I'm not certain that newer versions still provide this capability.

OG

 

[brendan.buchan]

ShadowProtect Desktop is $99, but what you're actually paying for is the license for the software that you install on the machine to schedule/automate, backup and restore.

Once you have purchased the license you have access through the website to download the ISO's for the StorageCraft Recovery Environment which you can burn to CD/USB and can be used to do backup and restore without installing anything on the machine.

 

[uptown47]

Thanks for all the great advice in this thread. Much appreciated

 

[xzen]

As far as I know Vmware do support passthrough of serial ports.

 

[Dravik]

For serial, I've used a lot of these http://www.perle.com/products/device-server.shtml
Started when we had a couple systems that needed to be moved and the cables wouldn't reach...

 

[The Plc Kid]

ISTR that all of them wanted to be installed on the media being backed up. That wont work on the *nix boxes and I dont want it on the Windoze boxes. What does your Shadow Protect cost you?

Post # 25 Gives you the answer you need. You can lease IT edition on USB but it's expensive. Buy a license of desktop then get the ISO and roll your own.

 

[The Plc Kid]

As far as I know Vmware do support passthrough of serial ports.

That's a common mistake. It does support serial port passthrough but it was tricking in some versions of 4.x but fully supported in 5.x and forward but that's speaking ESXI. Workstation has never had an issue with it.