I've struggled with this for some time. First I had a RAID, but the manufacturer of that unit went under and I decided that if the controller failed, I'd be dead meat. What to do? My computer has all sorts of stuff on it to which the importance of my ham radio stuff pales in comparison. I have Really Important Stuff that if lost, wouldn't be fatal but death would be far easier to deal with.
My computer uses SATA drives and I have a single 500 GB drive in it. I bought a BlacX USB SATA adapter into which you can literally plug in SATA drives. I bought another 500 GB SATA drive that I plug into it. WIth the new drive came a bit of software called Acronis True Image. I liked it enough that I upgraded to the Pro version. Hey! I paid for ham radio software! I might as well pay for other stuff, too! I use that software to clone my entire disk -- all partitions. This way, if I ever lose the disk drive, all I need do is plug in the cloned drive and everything is back exactly as it was when I last cloned the system. No reinstalls, no searching for downloaded software, no digging for license keys, no finding old CD-ROMs... The drawback is that it takes time to clone the entire disk through a USB2.0 link. About 90 min or so. Thus, I do these overnight or while I'm away at work. I also have a second, smaller USB2.0 320 GB PATA drive that I use for partial backups of data-only files. I might trash those by some boneheaded key stroke or mouse click, but leave the hardware perfectly fine. I use that drive as a data only backup. This approach may not be for everyone and is far from perfect (I don't keep multiple copies of the system disk in different, fireproof locations, for example) and I remove the drive from he cradle when I'm not using it (to protect from lightning). There are many other ways this system can fail, but it works for me in that I'm comfortable with the risks. 73, Kim Elmore N5OP ______________________________________________________________ Dxbase mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/dxbase Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
