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I have a 6,4 Gb Main Hard disk, an auxiliary IDE drive dedicated to backups
(my old main 4Gb IDE disk) one optical drive but with limited capacity).
The disk imaging program I use is powerquest DiskImage 2.0 it is not
expensive (approx $70), and works fine. The url for the disk image sofware
is www.powerquest.com. They carry a trial version.
I made tests on crash and rebuild, it is fast reliable, within 5 minutes
your computer is back up and running, take another 5 minutes then to restore
latest files from an incremental zip and it's done, you are back in
business. Restoring from tape would be more like 2 or 3 hours, especially if
you have to restore several incremental backups in a row.
To make a disk image, I boot on DOS and I run the disk image program. It is
anyway easier to use on Win98, since it switches easily from Win98 to DOS
without rebooting. I choose to make a disk image on the second IDE drive. It
is even possible to automate the backup process through scripts.
Personally I do this once a week and I zip all my stock data files on the
second disk every day (actually I have an 640 Mb optical drive on which I
store zipped files as well) and I backup my computer with disk image once a
every week.
My point that it, if you are using a single computer, this is the fastest,
more reliable and less expensive way to make backups.
A third possibility is to use mirroring soft driver (slower) or hardware
(just as fast as a single system). You would have data redundancy in real
time (data is stored on both two disks rather than on one disk, but I didn't
choose it because I want to protect myself from an operating system failure
or PC crash leading to an unrecoverable error in file system).
So I think it is safer to make hard disk backups, with a small loss of data
penalty between two backups if the system crashes, rather than trusting the
operating system. That's a choice.
If you are using several computers and a network, you should consider
putting backup files on a server with a large disk space, then do the backup
from the server to tape. You can use RAID 5 on the server for additional
security. Those who are interested in disk storage can refer to
http://www.oramag.com/oracle/96-Nov/66dba.html discussing High Availability
disk systems).
A tape backup of the overall system stored at a different place is nice in
case of fire or robbery.
Backups will always more efficient if they are made from workstations to a
server first, and then from the server to tape, rather than backuping
workstations through the network. It requires additional disk space on the
server, but nowadays hard-disk price is not a problem anymore. Tapes became
popular because disk space was expensive, now you get a 15 Gb or more Hard
disk for around $300-$400.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-metastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-metastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of John Sellers
Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 8:40 PM
To: 'metastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'
Cc: 'Rich Bulow'
Subject: RE: Off Topic: Choice of Processor
May I ask what name of the software you use for disk imaging?
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