Backup headaches - off topic

["Daniel A. Poiree" <danielpoiree@xxxxxxxxx>]

I hope some of you might be able to help.

I have been trying to find a way to do a complete backup of my drives, most
of wich are about 7 - 15 gigs each on three different computers. (I'm
backing up to removable hard drives.)

I can create disk imiges using ghost which is fine, but then I'd like to do
a differential backup of changed files since doing the disk image. I'd been
advised that if I ran the command "attrib -a *.* /s" at a c prompt imediatly
after doing the disk image, all the files would be marked as backed up and
any differential or incremential backup would back up only the files that
were new or changed since running the "attrib -a *.* /s"

The problem is that when I did a test using the backup utility in W2000, 4
gigs of data to back up.

Simply using the same backup utility to do a complete backup of the C drive
generates an error after the backup files reaches a size of about 4 gigs.
(I'm using FAT 32 file system.) Curiously, sometimes the error says the disk
is full when there are many gigs free.

I'm left to wonder if there is a four gig limit to the file size using FAT
32. I've have conflicting advice from so called experts but I havent found
anything official from microsoft.

I was also advised to use NTI's Backup NOW! product. The problem with it is
that I can't get it to back up to anywhere except the CDRW. I don't want to
spend hours swaping CD's to do a backup.

So, I think I could get all that I want if only I could reset the "Backup
tag" or whatever it is that really triggeres the backup utility into backing
up or not backing up. I suspect that the "A" tag doesn't get changed on
hidden or read only files and that I could change it if I removed the "H" or
"R" tag, but then how could I reset the "H" or "R" back again on all thoes
files?

Obviously, I'm not much of a DOS user.

Last, I had one person suggest that I use Backup Exec by VERITAS. Does
anyone know if that would backup 15 gigs to a hard drive? (I'm getting tired
of buying software that only does half the job!)

Another suggested ZTree...

I want to be able to get going again relitivly quickly after a hard drive
crash, fire, theft, etc. without reloading all the software and then the
data.

Any ideas?

Thanks much,

Daniel Poiree
Bellingham WA