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This may or may not meet other people's needs, but here's what I do for
backup.
I have four PCs on a network at home. One is powered on all the time,
another is always on unless I'm out of town for several days. The other
machines are for my family's use and don't have a lot of data that needs
regular back-ups. Each of my two primary PCs has at least two 15gig hard
drives with the second drive in each machine holding the backup data. The
routine I use is simple:
1 - Figure out which directories you want to backup. For me the only thing
I routinely want to backup each day is my TS data and my MS Money files.
Everything else (documents, address books, whatever) I can do weekly - which
in practice turns out to be every month or so.
2 - Use the attrib command to turn on the archive attribute of each file in
the directory and sub-directories you want to copy. (ATTRIB +A
C:\WHATEVER\*.* /S)
3 - Use xcopy to copy the files to the place where I want to store the
backups. (XCOPY C:\WHATEVER\*.* D:\BACKUPS\WHATEVER\*.* /M /S) [Yupo, I'm
aware there are syntaxes - this is what I use.] That makes the PC copy all
the files in c:\whatever and put them in d:\backups\whatever. All the
subdirectories get copied, too. As each file is copied the archive bit is
turned off. I know that using xcopy brings along some baggage in that it
does not gracefully maintain long file names. Since most of the stuff I'm
backing up has short file names, there aren't a lot of problems. The only
place in TS where I use long names is to name workspaces, so if I crash and
have to recover I can plan to take three minutes and rename those relatively
few files.
4 - Next I make a little batch file with the xcopy command above in it. The
batch file can direct the backup files to other directories, drives, or PCs
on my LAN.
5 - In Microsoft's task scheduler I tell it to go run that batch file each
night at 0100 (or whenever). When the file runs it goes through the
directories looking for just those files that have changed. Those get
copied to the backup location.
It's painless - takes about five minutes to set up - and essentially runs
invisibly in the background. I check every once in a while to make sure
it's still working and I've never found a problem.
Overwriting yesterdays data with today's is okay for my uses, but some
backup strategies want to keep Monday's data separate from Tuesday's and
Wednesday's, etc. That can easily be done by creating different batch files
and Task Scheduler entries to copy the data to different storage areas like
D:\BACKUPS\MONDAY\WHATEVER, etc.
This is an additive type of backup - meaning that if you make your backup
and then delete files from the original directory, they will still be
sitting there out in the backup area. For my use that has been a plus. To
keep things kind of clean, every year - normally during the Christmas
break - I delete the backup directories and start over from the beginning.
I occasionally put backup copies on each of my PCs, even the kids.
Having all of these backups on hard drives is great, but just in case of
disaster I keep my really essential stuff (Money files and
functions/indicators/workspaces I have spent a lot of time developing) on
zip disks that I keep safe away from the house. They get updated every
couple of months. That way if lightning strikes during a simultaneous wind
storm, flood, and earthquake I can always buy a new PC and have it setup and
running in a day or so. I won't have my historical data, but in a few hours
I could collect enough data to start trading my methods again.
I've never had to change a tape and I've never had a hard drive crash -
probably because I have backups.
Matt
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