Hi:

You may or may not be interested in my method but here it is.

Since 1994 I have used several methods of backup...in fact in 1996 I even owned and operated a remote backup service.

I have had backup fails in restoring just too many times, and since my business is on my computer, plus it is just such a tremendous pain to have to have the down time involved in restoring, I now do my backups a little differently...and if a hard drive goes down I can have the computer back up and running within 10 minutes of the drive going down.

I run 2 identical drives in the computer plus a third that is kept off site....all are partitioned identically also such that they each have active partitions.

The off-site hard drive is updated with a new backup every other week. The second hard drive in the computer is an exact mirror of the master (C) hard drive.

What this means is that if my C drive goes down I simply open the computer, take out the bad C drive, take the second drive(D), undo the ribbon and switch the jumper from slave to master, then put the ribbon that was on the C drive on what used to be the D drive...having done this my D is now my C (which has the identical content of the bad Drive) and away I go....the most i stand to lose is anthing from the niight before backup to the time of day that the drive goes down.

This is done using a small DOS batch file run from a desktop icon.....I run it every night and it takes about 45 minutes to backup 70 Gigs.

There are hardware solutions for portable drives (for an off-site drive), but I just simply leave a ribbon and power plug sticking out of the cover and then plug in the off-site drive, reboot and run the backup batch file pointing to that drive.

Should this method interest you just send me an email (address at top of post) and I will send you the batch file....put backup in the subject of the email so your email doesn't get deleted as spam.

Cornell




Your own first product...the dilema solved