General thoughts about PC storage...
There are some choices in this area: Full or incremental copying.
A full copy, as the name implies, is a copy of 'whatever' when the copy was made. This copy can stand alone, meaning that it is all that's needed for a full restoration. The upside is that it is simpler; hence, less trouble prone, while the downside is that multiple copies occupy multiples of disk space. Also, YOU are responsible for keeping track of the copies you make. If your archive gets damaged, you can easily try another.
An incremental copy is an 'original' copy plus an archive of changes. The advantages of this method is that most data never changes throughout the life of your system while only a small amount gets altered. (An example: A huge program with an .INI file -- the program is static, the .INI file remains in constant flux.) So --- you can make plentiful copies of your system without filling your disk. On my system, I have about 350 meg of stuff, but less than 1% changes from one week to the next. This type of archive would grow by that 1% per copy. Of course there's a downside -- complexity. As you can imagine, any error, anywhere in this archive, would compromise the whole thing. You may not be able to restore ANY data. Not nice!
I use Drive Image. When I wanted a package to do this stuff, I posted to this thread my requirements with a request for suggestions. I only received one reply, from Rich, and he suggested Drive Image. I read the box at the computer store and it seemed OK. It saved my bacon dozens of times since. I'm 'adventuresome' and often things go wrong. This package restores my system in a jiffy. I'm sure many competing packages are available which work well too: Perhaps a few work better. I'm happy with what I use.
Cheers, PW.
P.S. The backup program that comes with Win98 will create a full backup and then incremental backups. The one time I needed to restore my system, I discovered that my latest incremental backup overwritten my original full backup. Needless to say, I wasn't pleased, and was very committed to replacing Win98 backup with something I could rely on: hence, the post, the answer, and Drive Image. |
