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Personally, I'm mistrustful of most backup software because Windows is so
complicated. My solution is to simply make sure I have all the CDs and
downloads for all the software I have installed and make backups of my data
files (this includes market data, email databases, source code (my most
cherished commodity)) every week using WinZIP to another computer. I keep
my directories organized with backup in mind.
I also have virus protection and UPSes on my important PCs and network
equipment.
UPS update: I bought a Belkin 1000KVa for $149 about 9 months ago when one
of my previous UPSes died. It has performed flawlessly since installation
thru some very severe Atlanta weather. I will definitely pick up more of
them should the need arise.
Kent
----- Original Message -----
From: "cwest" <cwest@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Mike Symth" <mqsymth@xxxxxxxxx>; "Omega Users Group"
<omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, December 22, 2002 8:01 PM
Subject: RE: OffTopic Backup Redux
Interesting comments Mike. I've yet to find any tools that adequately
addresses backups, imo. My experience has been that file by file backups are
useless if a disk fails, unless you have nothing else to do for a few days.
Image backups seem to be the only kind of backup from which you can recover
within minutes.
It would be great if there was a product that did image-diff backups. That
is, insert changes into images. Powerquest have a product that'll do this
(they say), but the Admin user account is hard-coded to SA without a
password, which exposes a PC to worms. I asked them about that and they said
the work-around was not to connect your LAN o the Internet, They're a
smart/dumb company, imo.
Has anyone really solved the backup issue better than Mike's experiences and
tested it in real-world situations?
Colin West
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Symth [mailto:mqsymth@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Sunday, December 22, 2002 4:45 PM
To: Omega Users Group
Subject: OffTopic Backup Redux
I've been following the thread on backups and here is
my experience.
I have two computers using win98SE networked through a
linksys router.
At the end of each day or during the day I use
Synchromagic by www.gelosoft.com to synchronize the
files and directories that I consider important
between the two computers. I use both computers
during the day and I like both computers to be
up-to-date. In case one computer goes down, I have all
the info from my TS files, internet files and etc
ready to go on my other computer.
I also had GoBack 3.0 installed on both computers.
All was well until one of my computer's disk directory
got wacked. GoBack was worthless and even made things
worse on the computer that had the problem. Maybe
GoBack was the culprit when it failed it might have
messed up the c: directory.
I was able to continue work on the good computer
without a problem, but it took me considerable time to
bring back the computer drive that failed.
Since disk drives are cheap, I bought 2 new drives and
installed them as drive D: on both computers. On one
computer, at the suggestion of this group, I'm using
XactCopy by www.duocor.com. This is a great piece
of back up software, however you can't use drive d:
when using Xactcopy. Xactcopy hides drive d: and uses
it only for itself.
On the other computer I used Drive Image 2002 to make
an exact copy of drive c: on drive d:. In addition, I
was going to use Drive Image 2002 to make a compressed
backup image of drive c: on drive d: but it takes
Drive Image 1 hour to create an image of a 40gig drive
every time you want to backup drive c: While this
method gives you full access to using drive d: the
backup time is onerous.
What I finally decided to do on computer 2 is to use
Synchromagic. Synchromagic has a backup mode that will
backup every directory and the files in them in drive
C: to drive D:. You even have the option of excluding
any directories or files you don't want to back up.
Synchromagic is also fast. I would say it backups
faster than XactCopy.
In addition, I still use Synchromagic to synchronize
directories and files between both computers.
Synchromagic will also synchronize more than one
computer across a network and will ftp synchronize
across the internet (I haven't used that option).
Hope this helps.
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