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Old November 3rd 07, 02:42 AM posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage,alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt,alt.backup-software,alt.comp.periphs.cdr
Iago
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Posts: 7
Default BACKUP & RECOVERY: Please share your strategies + software product(s) you prefer (MBR, NTLDR, PARTITIONS, DISK IMAGES etc.)

On Nov 1, 3:24 pm, MISS CHIEVOUS wrote:
Hey Guys,

This summer I purchased Symantec's PARTITION MAGIC 8.0 and GHOST 10.0
- in part to implement a backup strategy for use with two 500 GB PATA

snip
Thank you and I'm sorry this was so long!

MC


Well, you probably won't like my comments because I have a very
different approach, dare I say opposite to yours? Anyway, please don't
take these as smart aleck comments or personal attacks.

In that long message you never once mentioned what your backup
objectives are. You should identify what you want to protect, and how
often. Also important is to give some thoughts on how fast your
recovery has to be. Can you wait weeks, months, days, minutes or
hours? Nobody can do this for you.

Point number two, automation is the key to a good backup. You should
not have to start or monitor the operations as you seem willing to do.

Third, having only one backup target, I mean your recovery drive, is
a very poor choice. If your computer breaks your data may be safe but
not accessible at least until you can rig up another machine and
transplant the drives. Is this time acceptable? Of course to answer
that question you have to define what's the longest you can stay
without data.

Also have you considered the possibility that both drive get zapped
because of a short or lightening? Hope you will never have a fire but
if you do, are you going to run out of the house carrying your PC? An
external device for backup is a much better choice because is easy to
move to a different machine.

Better yet if you can manage to have removable media as backup
targets, and start a rotation to a different place, a relative, a
friend or a bank vault.

Whatever your choice, you should never trust a single medium, or a
single application. A safe backup strategy should include automated
multiple backups run to different media and using different
applications.

Have you considered versioning? If I understand correctly you keep
refreshing a backup copy on the same drive. Versioning would keep
alive multiple versions of the same file, as many as you choose to
have..

That's all what I have for now, but as a parting shot (pardon the
pun) I find your partitioning scheme extremely and possibly
unnecessarily complicated. You may think to have good reasons to do
so, but forgive me for saying that I doubt the pros outweigh the
cons. The KISS rule applies also to backups.

Good luck with your project

Art