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To: Sean W. Smith who wrote (1220)	6/8/1998 11:43:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (1) of 14778

[The Proposed backup solution to SW's Trading Machine] affectionatly known as The Multimonitor Beast Remember I am not pushing tape.I would recommend almost anything over the previosuly recommended solution. I beleive very strongley about it. Have 1 backup device of any kind is not wise. True removable technology gives you an opportunity to increase those odds by a factor of N while maintaing robustness and keeping cost to a minimum. First a comment on mission critical data files. My own mission critical files, the ones I make my living with are backed up three times on two media types (CDR and 5 1/4 MO). One set is kept off site. This is a selective file backup system. Original files are written once to a final resting place (MO media). Then one copy of the original file and one copy of the MO file are made respectively to each of two CDR media. One CDR is removed from site. Minimal file transfers and overwrites will reduce the chances of a corrupted file IMO. All files are indexed and byte counts logged. I assign a higher priority to these files than I do an OS load / application configuration. Recently the OS / application configuration has become more critical. I can restore and reconfigure my DOS machines in a couple of hours and have never seen a need to back them up in any form. The OS / application configuration has become mission critical in a couple of my own applications. In these applications the DATA files are maintained as above but the configurations (the OS and applications and configurations) also need a backup solution. A hard drive crash or corrupted configuration would put me out of business. The Ideal solution would be to be up and running in five minutes. The configuration of the system remains the same over time. I use the identical set up that I used two months ago so I see no need for any type of daily backup of the configuration For the above I see no better solution than a second hard disc with a tested working configuration. I did not and do not recommend mirroring for this type of backup solution. (perhaps this is better referred to as a disaster recovery strategy) Second best for the above scenario with the tools available to me is a backup using Drive Image as indicated by Dave. It is certainly more economical than any other proposed solution. I could backup the C Drive to an existing partition (I have 9 GB drives with 4x 2 GB FAT partitions). I would then copy the file to an MO drive for transport to CDR. The total cost for a backup (excluding $50 software) would be $2. It is in this context that I made the proposed backup solution for Street Walkers Trading Machine. My recollection is that SW indicated in previous posts that he does not keep mission critical DATA on his machine. If he does I concur that the strategy needs additional components. I view Street Walkers Trading Machine as an operations machine similar to the above noted case. If he has a working configuration that does not change on a daily basis a second hard disc makes sense, at least to me. I am not recommending a compressed file. I am recommending a working configuration on a second IDE drive. The second working system should be tested ( I have not tested this "theory" myself but will in the next six months or so, I see no reason that it will not work). 1) The test procedure would be to turn off the machine. 2) Boot to bios and change the boot sequence of the two drives. 3) The "new" system should now work off the second drive. 4) The restoration process should take less than five minutes. It is faster and more definitive than any other solution I have seen to date. 5) The cost is the price of a second hard disk and Disk Copy software. The best copy procedure is still being debated. JMHO The Poster

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