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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: deibutfeif who wrote (142644)	9/3/2001 12:13:05 PM
From: tcmay	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

<<TC, re:...Maybe I'm unusual... <<I think you are (unusual) in that most people don't even have a backup method in place. Nor are they organized enough to have all the software/OS there ready to reinstall. Nor to they want to spend the time it takes. In addition, they're not even sure exactly what to do and so are just plain scared that something will "go terribly wrong" (undoubtedly the case if they have no backup ;^).>> Knowing how to install the OS and restore apps is a good way to be less "scared" that "something will go terribly wrong." (The same applies to knowing how to work on car engines, but this is a Rubicon I have decided not to cross.) You're right about backups, though. There was a funny episode of HBO's "Sex and the City" where the main actresses Powerbook crashed and she had no clue that such things as "backups" even existed. "You mean three years of my articles are just gone forever?" Here's how I backup: I manually copy folders and files to a 12x CD-R drive. It takes about 6 minutes to write 700 MB of data (I also tell the software, Toast, from Adaptec/Roxio) to verify the writing. I never get any errors, but the verification makes me feel better. Sometimes I make a complete set of everything on my hard disks of interest, and then I make _two_ copies of everything. (I'll use two different vendors of CD-Rs, e.g., Maxell and some Fry's cheapie. I figure that if some vendor has a problem with his process, such as bit rot or fungus or delamination, it won't happen to both vendors.) I used to use "incremental backup" tools, like Retrospect (from Dantz). This wrote only the changes to a backup disk. I gave up on this when I was never quite certain that I could successfully recover files this way (and there's the issue of losing the catalog file and/or the passphrase). Just more comforting to have the "real" files and folders as items which can be seen on the desktop. And I don't worry about compression, either. At 20 cents a blank CD-R, why bother with a 2x compression? (Most of my files are either text, which compresses by only the entropy of English factor, about 2x, or are already compressed as JPEGs and the like.) I also have several large drives on my system: a 60 GB Maxtor internal EIDE, an 80 GB Maxtor Firewire external, and a 20 GB LaCie Firewire external. Critical files can be replicated across a couple of disk drives. Finally, an old 128 MB magneto-optical drive and about 80 disks. These supposedly have even longer shelf lives than CD-ROMs do (I'm skeptical that CD-ROMs actually fail, having seen only isolated reports of delamination or fungus--and my CDs from 1983 still play perfectly. Admittedly, the process of pressing a CD is different from burning a CD-ROM, but...) I keep one set near my computers and another set in a fire-resistant gun vault. I had a set kept with Paul Engel, but I wasn't diligent about updating it. Note to self: get back into doing this. Further note to self: take a set of updated CDRs to his house this coming Thursday for the IR lunch. The joke goes like this: There are two kinds of people in the world: those who have _had_ a disk crash and those who _will_. I'm sure all of you sophisticated SI types have back-up strategies. <<Many on this thread are PC-tinkerers - often this makes them very PC-knowledgeable and therefore useful to this thread. But perhaps they're a bit blind to how the "rest of the world" operates.>> Maybe so. Waiting a couple of months to get XP on a machine seems reasonable, especially as prices are still dropping. But people should _still_ have some idea of how to reload the OS from their CD-ROMs. --Tim May