SCADA Back-up...

Hi all,

Tomorrow I have a job of backing-up two very important SCADA (Fix32) systems that run on Windows NT. On one of the pc's the cd-rom doesn't work.

The plan was to run Norton Ghost peer-to-peer over TCP/IP. I have a broadcom ethernet port on my laptop which Ghost cannot find a driver for (think i've sorted that but haven't tested). And I was going to have a external hd for the back-up to go on.

Is there a better/easier way to back-up and SCADA system?

Probably one of the best ways is to install a second HD & clone it using the old dos versions of cloning software I have done this in the past & it worked a treat, however if the I/O driver uses some sort of licence i.e. none moveable files on the HD it could be a problem although the clone will work it may be that the I/O driver will not see the licence.

Is downtime acceptable for the backup? Do you have any form of install files/project backups? Do they have a plan to lifecycle/upgrade the system in the forseeable future?

1. How is the external hard drive going to connect to the NT box? SCSI? USB is unlikely. Remember the "good old days" with the "hardware compatibility list" - painful...

2. Ghost can be run from a DOS-esque boot floppy/CD. I would slave a second hard drive for this. If you have a boot CD, you might bring the SCADA drive to a new machine for the imaging. Remember to track the jumper settings (master/slave for IDE, channel number for SCSI)

3. Test the cloned drive in the legacy PC to see if the licensing mechanism copied correctly. If not, you'll need vendor support.

4. Not to scare you, but the imaging process puts the drive through its paces, particularly if it is suffering from physical damage. I would disclose this to your customer with a data recovery plan (many good companies provide this service). Wikipedia provides lots of info about tools as well.

5. As a close second step for your customer, consider all the other legacy components that could fail. It's not easy to replace parts on an old NT machine. This is a good time to clean the box. Try to get the copied hard drive image running on different hardware.

5a. That makes me wonder...a VMWare Physical to Virtual conversion might not be such a bad idea. A working virtual machine could easily stand up to hardware failure. The license key or proprietary hardware may be the difficult parts.

Good luck. I've done this sort of job a few times. It always manages to make me a little nervous.

At the least you should backup:

1) SCADA pic files (.grf)
2) Tag group files (.tgd) if any
3) SCADA Database folder (includes the .PDB file!)
4) Any SCU or Security Config setup files associated with the system

All these files should fit nicely on a Flash USB stick (depending on the size of your system, choose the appropriate size).

Personally, Norton Ghost seems like a little overkill unless you want to backup the entire drive, programs and everything. But there is only so much you can do especially if your system relies on remote locations for various paths (ie, Fix server on one machine, GRFs on another).

Depending on what you have set up on your system, it might just be easier to recover the system by reinstalling Fix and other components manually, then popping in the backed up SCADA / PDB / config files.

At my client's site, we use Factory Talk Asset Center to back up all our software. The backups that we check in consist of nothing more than I mentioned above (in a ZIP file).

If you are looking for total redundancy or cloned systems I'd recommend giving VMWare a look, as mentioned above. Are your HDDs in RAID? This will provide redundancy and fault tolerance, but is really not a substitute for backing up your system, though a nice supplement.

Hi,

Been in a similar situation before where customer wanted a complete hot-swappable SCADA PC and easiest way given USB restrictions on Win NT was to clone the drive in-situ onto drive for the new PC temporarily installed onto slave channel of IDE interface using free version of HDClone software (http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html). This software boots from a floppy into it's own OS and does a very effective job of cloning the drive sector by sector. Not sure if this will successfully transfer licence keys over as well as in my application licence was on a hardware dongle. The paid for versions of HDClone offer improved speed and verification options but as long as you can live with the PC downtime then the free version is fine.

Regards,
Corby