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Strategies & Market Trends : The Thread Formerly Known as No Rest For The Wicked -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kathyh who wrote (28950)	4/18/1999 11:58:00 PM
From: Waldeen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 90042

HI Kathy! O.T. on tape drives, computer stuff. Fantastic computer you ordered! (I just put one together a lot like it planning to run trading software on too.) The Trinitron monitor choice is dang excellent. Years of staring at 'em, and I will use a non-Sony Monitor as long as it is a Trinitron tube and offers at least 85 Hz at the resolution of interest. Alas, guess that will change with DFPs. But, glad you bit the bullet and went for the best. You will love it and not regret it. Tapes: Hope I'm not sticking my nose in too much, but I've been doing NT/Unix admin. for years, and the tape drive is an excellent choice. NT is not as plug and play friendly as 95/98, and most of the "professional" backup software looks for a tape drive when doing a complete system backup i.e. if you are serious the best software will ask for a tape. CDs, Zip, Jazz, Magneto Optic, etc. are good for "file level" backup not necessarily "system level" backup. Doing both file back-ups and "complete" system level backups is best. As HP says, hp.com IMO anyone who has done full time computer admin. 'tends' to go for a tape backup. (Either 8mm or DDS being the premium solutions, hp.com ) With PC's encroaching into "servers", a lot of people have given me a hard time for saying CD, zip, Jazz, etc. is not enough... as they are kinda coming up from "smaller" systems to "servers". But, I don't believe there are many left who haven't had to "eat crow" or beg forgiveness while asking for recovery help. Guess this is one people have to learn the hard way. Gotten much better that MS has released Sevice Pack 4 for NT, as earlier releases were ...well... unstable to us old Unix gurus. Bottom line, any media that doesn't allow you to back-up your entire hard drive onto 1 media, is not back-up IMHO. So make sure the 10/20 GB eide tr5 tape backup is 10 GB uncompressed. Sometimes they will assume a 2x compression if they are being sneaky. But the wording you wrote implies 10 GB uncompressed, 20 GB compressed, which means it will hold your 13.6 GB drive uncompressed until over 70% full or you use two tapes. Compression will slow the backups down, and that aggravates the disadvantage of tape drives. Looks good!!!! You'll sleep better at night knowing that you can restore a complete working system from tape in an hour or so when some MS software upgrades hoses you over and you can't seem to go back to when it was working. more free advise than you ever wanted... Waldeen

To: kathyh who wrote (28950)	4/19/1999 8:06:00 AM
From: MARU CAT	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90042

Hi Kathy: I never backup my entire system, just my data. IMO, tape is fine, but CD Writer is more versatile. So, if my hard drive were to fail, I would have to reinstall all of my program files. That's OK with me because by the time my drive fails, it would be better to reinstall everything anyway since Windows slows down as you add/remove programs. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind having tape and backuping up my entire drive, but I would choose CD first. I have a 25Gb hard drive so I couldn't back it all up to tape anyway. You can only backup 650 MB on CD at a time. I personally use much more than 650 MB because I do a lot of graphics. But I put my backups on a couple of CD's. The good thing is that if I want to archive I can quickly recover from CD vs. tape. I can also make music CD's. But on the other hand, what's $200 after all the money we've been making in the past months. Your going to have a FOREtune soon! MARU CAT p.s. You're seem so nice, I hope you win the grand prize! ;)