Computer back-up solution

I think my PC is on its way out, and I'm looking for an inexpensive solution to start backing up. I just bought Norton Ghost and I'm looking at buying a CD/RW drive. Is this a good solution? Do you know of any way to schedule automatic back-ups?

Thanks!
Vincent Dorazio
www.grocerybook.com

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

Hi,

You were kind enough to send me your method, and I thank you for it.

Best,

- Boyd

Hi Boyd:

Don't recall getting an email from you and sending the files to you...can you clarify?

I would have sent you an email but the last email address I can find for you on the computer was from '99 and it bounced back to me.

Cornell

Hi,

I'm the guy from AOL you sent the file to whose addy starts with 'a' and ends with 'e.'

Thank you again very much!

In case of a fire, you'll have your offsite drive, but if you buy a new computer and install the backup drive in it, will there be an incompatibility?

Best,

- Boyd

Hi Boyd:

> Thank you again very much!

You are most welcome.

> In case of a fire, you'll have your offsite
> drive, but if you buy a new computer and
> install the backup drive in it, will there
> be an incompatibility?

Not really...if your drive jumpers are set to cable select the computer will fire right up. If the computer drives are using jumper settings of slave and master, you have to enter set up as the computer boots up and use auto detect hard drive setting...once the computer recognizes the drives you close set up and away you go. Pretty simple and it sure pays off in lack of aggravation and that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach when the C drive goes down.

Funny anecdote....I posted this on Tuesday, and yesterday just after lunch my C drive bought the big one....just switched my D to C and was back running in under 10 minutes...sure beats lost time of having to format a new drive right then, and then doing a restore from a backup.

Cornell

Cornell's method is what I'd do if I needed a robust and quick to restore solution--I too prefer "copy" to "backup" for reasons Cornell mentioned.

What I used to do could suit people with 1 PC. Ever since motherboards have supported 2 hard drives, I've always installed my 'old' HD whenever I upgrade a PC. It's usually smaller & slower, but does fine.

I only copy my own data - ie I don't copy programs or Windows. The key to this is putting all your own data in the My Documents folder tree. Whenever I want, I then just open Windows Explorer and drag the MyDocs folder to the old drive and let it copy away.

To make this most effective, make sure you select a MyDocs sub-folder as the 'data folder' for your programs, eg Office, email etc. The only non-MyDocs folders I have to additionally copy are the Windows Favorites and Cookies folders.

If your main drive fails, you'll lose all your Registry settings. In short, you'll have to reformat/replace your main drive and then install Windows and all your programs--plus set up any program preferences you couldn't store under MyDocs.

But at least you'll have all your data, which is the stuff you can't replace from CDs or online. Besides, when I used this method, Win98 was all that was available--and that needed reformatting & reinstalling 3-4 times a year anyway to keep things running well.

In recent years we use Windows2000 and have 4 PCs networked--2 main PCs, 2 old ones. Now just copy MyDocs from 1 main PC to the other whenever, and copy both to one of the old PCs once a month.

I'll probably have to move to Cornell's solution soon though, as the data is becoming more important now and of course my method doesn't cover us off-site for catastrophe like fire.

Btw, an ounce of prevention: invest in an UPS device to protect against problems with your elictricity supply. Those can damage your drives, motherboards or other hardware over time.

Mike.


Atlantic Bridge Publishing