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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (825)	5/25/1998 1:27:00 PM
From: LTBH	Respond to of 14778

Cds, Tape and HDs Your scheme is fine. The weak link is if you do something stupid. If you can't determine what this is before the fact then you can't ensure your second HD was backed up "when things were working right". Second item is discipline. Will you ALWAYS do that backup. As I indicated earlier, I PERSONALLY am on the sidelines for all the variations of CD/DVD until standards are ironed out and install base/vendor support indicate todays purchase is viable for the forseeable future. I do believe (and have for 8 years) this could be a great media, if the vendors don't horse around another 8 years achieving the focus provided by a uniform standard and marketing. This leaves either tape or HD. If you can afford the second or third HD, then this is a viable solution. Whether you go your suggestion or RAID is a personal choice that should be made after sufficient research into the two alternatives. Life in general and PCs in particular, seldom have total solutions. We just have to chose what we think is best for our situation at the time. This usually means accepting one "evil or another" to achieve a degree of the real choice we wish we had. Networm

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (825)	5/25/1998 1:46:00 PM
From: Dave Hanson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

We're on the same wavelength, Zeuspaul. This is _exactly_ what I wanted out of a backup solution. Essentially, it lets you try stuff cost-free (that is, only the cost of a 15-60 minutes time while you wait for Drive Image to restore the partition.) Once the system is "the way I like it," I save an image of the whole partition to either another partition on the same hard drive, or to another hard drive. Haven't yet tried saving it to another hard drive in a different machine via a network connection, but I gather that with a suitable dos Network driver (drive image is a dos program), this would be quite easy. I have also had good sucess saving it to a Sparq drive. Drivers for sparq and iomega drives, among others, are built into the product, as is spanning capability. Since you get pretty good compression (I'm getting about 40%-60% on the "low compression" setting), you need around 1/2-2/3 of the space in the partition available (in any supported media, spanned or unspanned) to do the backup. Since drive image simply generates an ordinary file, it's a great solution for laptop backups too. I do an image of my laptop configuration, then shoot it over the small lan here at home to my cheaper, larger HDD on my desktop. This also makes for added safety--since both the desktop and laptop's HDDs have a regularly updated copy of my key data, as well as the boot partitions, I'm covered if theft or damage sends one of my machines SOL. The solution is quite cheap too. Drive image can be had for about $56 (before a $15 rebate), and I noticed that the very fast 2880 maxtor 11.5 gig IDE hard drives have dropped in price again to around $335 shipped (see pricewatch.) If one doesn't mind cracking the case, or using one of the better-made removable IDE drive trays, these could even be removed and swapped for extra safety and storage capacity. Doubtless I'm omitting some other helpful details--please continue to ask away.