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Old August 16th 03, 04:21 PM
Ralph Mowery
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First, the amount of data is small - several years (3 or 4 I think) are
currently on 60 floppies.

Critical data is mostly MS Office type - Access DB, Excel, and Word .

The main PC is fairly new Dell with XP (Home edition I think) and it has a
CD Writer.

The main PC has a DSL connection to the Internet.

Note: Only 1 other PC and there is no critical data on it and it is NOT
networked/connected to the other PC.

Office personnel wants data backed up automatically and is willing to

ALWAYS
save to "My Documents" or 1 folder. And, they like the idea of being able

to
access the backed up data on another (home) PC that is also fairly new

(not
sure the details right now).

Backup Process/Proposal:

1) Since the data is small, thinking of just using a memory stick for
backup - or an external USB hard drive, but the drive seems like overkill.
2) Set up a scheduled job to run a simple copy command and run it nightly.
3) Manually run once a month a backup to CD writer (for offsite storage

just
in case).


The cd-r price is almost nothing. If the data is very small I would save
the data once a day on a floppy and at the end of the week save it to a CD.
For the floppies the way to do it would be to have atleast 5 of them and
lable them for each day of the week. If the data is larger than one floppy
then go to a cd-r and format it so that you can do multi sessions on it.
Again at the end of the week quit using it and go to another disc. When you
have about 3 months worth of disc throw out the oldest month. They do not
take up very much space and one day you will loose all your data on the hard
drive.
For about $ 20 you can get enough disc to back up lots of data.
How long would it take to reconstruct the data ?