"Tony Morgan" wrote in message
...
In message , John Russell
writes

"Pat Carpenter" wrote in message
.. .
Need suggestions for hardware and software to back-up all my data and
some of my applications files. Preferably incremental after the first
major back-up but not zipped or compressed.

My system is as follows :-

P4 2.6Mhz
1Gb ram
40Mb boot hard disc
120Mb video disc
Spare firewire (internal and external) skts available
1 spare hard drive slot available
OS XP Home to latest updates

Considering an external firewire hard drive about 200-250Mb as opposed
to an internal system

All recommendations gratefully received.

Blue Skies
Pat Carpenter

I would serioulsy think about doing disk cloning backups. These do
sector
by sector, as oposed to file by file backups. When you do a restore you
end
up with a disk/partition looking exactly like it did when you made the
backup. This is ideal for recovering from experiments with software etc
as
your not reliant upon uninstall to do it's job properly, which dosn't
always
happen. The disk images cloning programs create do allow individual files
to
be restored as well.

In general, I'd disagree John with your suggested backup policy for a
number of reasons.

1 By disk cloning, unless you do a chkdisk/f before each
backup (doubling your total backup time) then any
problems associated with defective sectors/clusters will
be regenerated on restore. Worse, if there are disk defects
on the disk to which you are restoring to, you'll certainly
lose data.

2. By doing a backup by directory/file then the files are
checked for integrity "on-the-fly" during the backup
process through the normal checksum validation.

3. A "disk clone" backup will take considerably longer,
and the corresponding restore will also take considerably
longer.

4. Half-decent backup clients use compression, which
reduces the quantity of backup media. Consider, John,
a 120GB drive using your recommendation will
require 26 DVDs and will take at least 13 hours.

5. Using your recommendation, base and incremental
backups are impractical, hugely increasing the time
of backups.

Insofar as a bullet-proof backup policy, I'd suggest the following:

1. If (unlike Pat) you have only one drive, then partition - giving
you (like Pat) a C: and a D: drive. Pat won't have to partition.

2. Map 'My Documents' for all users (the former
C:/Documents and Settings) to drive D:.

3. Move C:\Documents and Settings to drive D: Make sure
this C:\Documents and Settings directory structure is deleted.

4. Now do a base ('System') backup of drive C: to a "System"
backup media set. I'd suggest you set the verify flag in your
backup software when you do this.

5. Now do a backup of drive D: (if you've arranged your mapping
and directory structure properly as described above, this will
be a backup of the D:\Documents and Settings directory).

Now you've got a System backup which should never have to be touched
unless you add or remove software, at which time you should re-do your
System Backup. I keep my System backup, BTW, sealed in a 'stripline'
plastic bag hung on the back of my PC's case.

Using the media set from (5) above do a daily incremental backup of D:
You can (depending on your backup software and media) do this continuing
on the same weekly/monthly media set. This typically takes 10 minutes.
Either weekly or monthly according to your inclination, do a full backup
and repeat for the next week/month.

Video can be a pain. Filesizes are huge. What I do is exclude the
'Video' directory from the weekly/monthly as well as incremental
backups, and use write-back to miniDV tape for all video (at the end of
each video project). Including video in your normal backup strategy both
extends the times taken in backups and uses a lot of media.

I deliberately got myself a DVD burner that included DVD-RAM as well as
DVD-R and DVD-RW to contain my backup media costs. My PC has a lot of
software on board, so my System backup is contained on two 9.4GB DVD-RAM
cassette disks, and all my weekly and incremental daily backups are
supported by one 4.7GB DVD-RAM disk. Bear in mind, however, that as I
previously mentioned I exclude my video from backups and handle that
separately on miniDV tape.

It might sound a little complicated - but it isn't. And the advantage is
that weekly/monthly as well as incremental daily backups take no more
than 10 minutes to do.

Best of all, however, this policy is bullet-proof.
--
Tony Morgan
http://www.camcord.info

A similar strategy to John's works well for me. Sure, you need off-site
backup as well, but IME the vast majority of times you need a backup is when
a virus, bug or crappy program that you have installed screws up your
installation to the point of FUBAR (where R=recovery),and not because your
house burnt down.

At that point, simply restoring from a Ghost Or Drive Image that you took
recently is a fast way to get the system back up and running to exactly the
state you were in before a disaster occurred.Ghosting my C drive takes less
than 10 minutes, like you I have it partitioned and set up so applications
and related data are there, but personal data is on other drives. The disk
is regularly checked for integrity by automated night time check ups that
take no time at all as far as I am concerned.

My data is on the another physical drive which every night is copied to a
partition on the system drive, again as this happens overnight it takes no
time AFAIAC.

Once in a while I burn backups of my personal data and the C drive Ghosts
(which are small enough to fit on a DVD) and take them to work, just in case
of a real disaster, though at that point I suspect that recovering my PC
data would be low priority.

--
Tumbleweed

Remove my socks for email address

On Fri, 2 Apr 2004 08:18:16 +0100, "Tumbleweed"
wrote:
.... huge snip ....
A similar strategy to John's works well for me. Sure, you need off-site
backup as well, but IME the vast majority of times you need a backup is when
a virus, bug or crappy program that you have installed screws up your
installation to the point of FUBAR (where R=recovery),and not because your
house burnt down.

At that point, simply restoring from a Ghost Or Drive Image that you took
recently is a fast way to get the system back up and running to exactly the
state you were in before a disaster occurred.Ghosting my C drive takes less
than 10 minutes, like you I have it partitioned and set up so applications
and related data are there, but personal data is on other drives. The disk
is regularly checked for integrity by automated night time check ups that
take no time at all as far as I am concerned.

My data is on the another physical drive which every night is copied to a
partition on the system drive, again as this happens overnight it takes no
time AFAIAC.

But if your machine is infected with something nasty? If any media is
online, then you cannot guarantee the integrity of the data on that
media if the machine is compromised. If the backup is in a cupboard
somewhere, you don't have that problem.

And automatic copying may - worst case here - simply backup a new
infection.

Horses for courses though. Such a strategy is cheap and quick, and
may suit the requirements of some, if they've analyzed and are
prepared to take that risk.

Cautionary tale from history: I used to manage a small research mini.
I would do a full dump onto magtape, plus nightly incrementals: these
would be in sequence up a 2400' tape. When they became unmanageable,
it was time for a new full dump (about monthly anyway in practice).
One day I found a corrupted file on disk. To cut a long story short,
an intermittant disk fault was behaving much like one of the
incremental-damage win*ws viruses around now. And of course the data
on tape was just a copy of the damaged files. IIRC there were around
20 of these, and it took a couple of days scavenging through many
backup tapes to completely repair the damage. I was lucky in that (a)
I noticed the problem (by chance) within a few days of it starting,
and (b) it could have affected a *lot* more data. If we'd relied on a
single nghtly 'ghost' copy, we'd have been well up the proverbial
gumtree!

--
Please use the corrected version of the address below for replies.
Replies to the header address will be junked, as will mail from
various domains listed at www.scottsonline.org.uk
regards. Mike Scott Harlow Essex England.(unet -a-t- scottsonline.org.uk)

"Mike Scott" k wrote in
message ...
On Fri, 2 Apr 2004 08:18:16 +0100, "Tumbleweed"
wrote:
... huge snip ....
A similar strategy to John's works well for me. Sure, you need off-site
backup as well, but IME the vast majority of times you need a backup is
when
a virus, bug or crappy program that you have installed screws up your
installation to the point of FUBAR (where R=recovery),and not because
your
house burnt down.

At that point, simply restoring from a Ghost Or Drive Image that you took
recently is a fast way to get the system back up and running to exactly
the
state you were in before a disaster occurred.Ghosting my C drive takes
less
than 10 minutes, like you I have it partitioned and set up so
applications
and related data are there, but personal data is on other drives. The
disk
is regularly checked for integrity by automated night time check ups that
take no time at all as far as I am concerned.

My data is on the another physical drive which every night is copied to a
partition on the system drive, again as this happens overnight it takes
no
time AFAIAC.

But if your machine is infected with something nasty? If any media is
online, then you cannot guarantee the integrity of the data on that
media if the machine is compromised. If the backup is in a cupboard
somewhere, you don't have that problem.

Which is why I do both, though I only backup to DVD 1 or 2 times a month, I
could take the loss of a few emails and documents in the worst case. Plus,
very few viruses I've ever heard of do the 'erase the C' drive stuff, let
alone wipe other disks, or even infect multiple documents. Most of them seem
to be proxies for spam these days. So the chances of what you suggest,
though possible, are extremely remote.

And automatic copying may - worst case here - simply backup a new
infection.

Horses for courses though. Such a strategy is cheap and quick, and
may suit the requirements of some, if they've analyzed and are
prepared to take that risk.

Indeed.



--
Tumbleweed

Remove my socks for email address

But if your machine is infected with something nasty? If any media is
online, then you cannot guarantee the integrity of the data on that
media if the machine is compromised. If the backup is in a cupboard
somewhere, you don't have that problem.

Images are files in their own right and can be stored elsewhere. As I have a
multiple partion system I can create images of the important partitions on
other partions, and then onto DVD. This means I can restore my OS partion
from the hard drive at around 1.5 gb/sec if I should need too, which happens
a lot as I test a lot of prgrams and don't like to use System Restore to
get my OS back to an earlier baseline (does anyone reallt trust it?). If the
system is really trashed then the images can be restored from DVD to a new
PC.

The latest version of Acronis True image has moved these products on, but
ealier version trashed my hard drive so I am a bit wary. It has incremental
imaging and restores to different partition types if you should wish.

This means I can restore my OS partion
from the hard drive at around 1.5 gb/sec if I should need too

Meant 1.5gb/min!