Expedition Navigation Software 
1 of 1- apw
- Contributor
Offline - Registered: 9/24/2015
- Posts: 7
Hardware Redundancy - what's best?
After our several-year-old built-in boat PC (Advantech ARK-series, ,) stopped working -- thankfully briefly -- on an offshore race recently I started wondering about a backup hardware system. Of course I could get second ARK- PC as a duplicate, but the embedded PC with all it's connections and power supply etc makes keeping another machine with the same settings/hardware a PIA.
Has anyone tried installing Expedition + Windows on a bootable USB-2 or -3 stick? Very easy to take that home and duplicate from time to time), so another light and inexpensive 'dumb' PC could be swapped in, give exactly the same setup, functionality, etc ... Expedition licensing system might stop this from working as I understand it's PC-specific. Although each USB stick does have a unique hardware ID - maybe it works?
Or maybe there are more elegant solutions?
Last edited by apw (8/06/2016 12:19 am)
- Nick
- Moderator
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- Registered: 9/16/2015
- Posts: 3,000
Re: Hardware Redundancy - what's best?
It should work, but you probably wouldn't want it as a primary machine if it loses the graphics card acceleration etc
- gamsberry
- Expert
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- From: Seattle
- Registered: 9/17/2015
- Posts: 18
Re: Hardware Redundancy - what's best?
I couldn't risk failure on my first Vic-maui so we didn't cut many corners.
I bought a panasonic toughbook 20 to act as backup for the onboard digital yacht aqua compact. That certainly isn't necessary for expedition alone but I wanted something that could be used on deck for starts and also serve as a standalone failure host. Water resistant & daylight readable triples the cost over a pure compute platform.
I use acronis backup on the aqua doing daily system & hourly incremental expedition specific backups to the pc's SD card & two external memory sticks. One stick stays onboard & the other leaves the boat with me. I also used a sync program to copy all expedition specific data files to another memory stick that is run on demand - typically after the race.
I set the same software up on the toughbook and I use the synced data from the aqua to load the toughbook for post race analysis. In a failure situation the expedition specific backups could also be restored in either direction to either machine.
Last edited by gamsberry (8/07/2016 10:07 pm)