Back to the KOT (keep on trucking) drive concept. Recent
experience and thoughts...
Recently I had to produce "clean" NT 4.0 and Win 95 environments
for product installs, which are driving us crazy in our latest
product cycles. I had to have NT and 95 systems which I could
test installs on, and which I could easily return to pristine
state because something in our install is blowing away various
portions of 95 or nt or office 97 or multiples of these.
SO in the ZP mode, I copied clean versions of installs of
95 and NT to a backup hard drive (I have plenty of hard
drives in my system), then installed Office 97, then copied
those, then installed products under development.
During this process I had to revert a couple of times (nothing
to do with my products, I'm happy to say, but rather to do
with failed attempts to solve my earlier reported SCSI CD
problem). Sure enough, try a hardware install, blow it,
hell with it, copy OS (from a different OS boot), reboot,
voila! back in business. In this respect, KOT works perfectly.
BUT I have two levels of backup of two OSs which uses major
part of 1.6 gig drive. If I want more levels, price becomes
prohibitive. If I backup an OS version, I either make a new
level or replace an old one. Experience tells me that
troubles often don't show up soon enough to stop me from
backing up over the last good old one unless I make a lot
of copies. At 2-3 hundred mb per whack, that means I'm
back in the decide-what-to-write-over business. As soon
as I'm in that business, I know I will fail.
So that's what keeps me interested in the smallest possible
OS backup idea.
I think the optimum solution lies in between. KOT is valid
for immediate disaster recovery, but it will not replace
incremental OS backups for latent disaster recovery (my name
for the disasters you did but you ain't found out about yet).
Speaking of disaster recovery, I told my wife I'd be out
40 minutes ago, so I must run ...
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