At 12:18 AM 10/29/01 -0500, patricia wrote the following: >I was over at my mothers this weekend and she asked me if I could save >everything on her computer (backup her harddrive)... > >she has a Windows 95 PC... > >what do I need in order to accomplish that for her... ?? and... how do I >do it ??
Some general comments to put this work in perspective, mainly real-world (RW) versus PC user. In the RW backups are done up to twice a day and saved on tape. These are what are called incremental backups. Only files that have changed since the last backup are copied. These daily backup are then saved when a weekly backups is done. The weekly backups are saved and then a monthly backup is done. The monthly backups are saved and then a yearly backup is done. The yearly backups are saved for up to 7 years. Every time the next level of backups are accomplished the previous lower level backup tapes are recycled. For instance, when the weekly backup is finished the 7 previous daily backups are erased and put back into the tape pool. When the end of month backup is finished the previous 4 or 5 weekly tape backups are put back into the tape pool. In this manner, no matter when a hard disk drive crash occurs the most you are losing is 12 hours of work. However, depending upon the mainframe systems involved you may not even lose that especially with the new RAID arrays. That is, each drive is mirrored to another drive so that when one fails the other takes over. No loss of on-line activity occurs unless both drives fail simultaneously. Do a quick check of Google on the term "backup policy" to see what I mean: http://www.google.com/search?q=backup+policy However, in the PC world things change. No user backs up their system on a regular basis. Each disk drive is incompatible with the next one. The backup software will not backup files that can be restored across disk drives. The Operating system cannot be mirrored copied back to a hard drive unless it is the exact same model, type, size of the previous hard drive. That is, if I mirror copy a Window 95 system on a Western Digital 10Gb drive model xxx, then I would need to copy the mirror image back to a Western Digital 10Gb drive model xxx. I couldn't use a different size or a different manufacturer. Mirroring is the only way to reliably re-install an OS and all files. The problem with backups is what do you backup? Files or programs or both? Most times you don't want to backup the program because it doesn't change, only the files do. However, what files do you backup? No program tells you which ones should be backed up and which ones don't matter. You find this out the hard way when you try to copy your Outlook Express or Eudora files to another PC -- you are always missing something. Personally, I like a combination of incremental backups and disk copying and imaging. I have my major PC system on a home-network with file sharing enabled. The major PC has certain files copied (Eudora, downloads, school work, my web pages, etc.) copied to another system using FileSync (http://www.fileware.co.uk/products.htm). On weekends I make incremental backup copies on a Zip drive (http://www.iomega.com/). I make major software install image copies on CD using PowerQuest drive image (http://www.powerquest.com/driveimage/). Another program like this is Norton's Ghost http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ The drive image program allows me to restore my system to a pre-existing state after a fatal crash. The CD is used to restore the image on the hard drive to an exact state because is does a byte copy of the entire hard drive. The file sync and/or Zip disks allow me to get the system back to the state the drive was in at the time of the crash. The most I lose is the current work, normally no more than few hours worth. A hard drive crash would set me back about a day. -- Gerry Boyd ============= PCWorks Mailing List ================= Don't see your post? Check our posting guidelines & make sure you've followed proper posting procedures, http://pcworkers.com/rules.htm Contact list owner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Unsubscribing and other changes: http://pcworkers.com =====================================================
