On 14 Jan 99, at 10:32, Ira Wallin wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a backup startegy. I will be purchasing a PC
> shortly for basic home applications. Is a ZIP drive good enough? Do
> I need to invest in a tape drive? Is a second smaller hard drive the
> answer? Is there special software I can get to automate the process?
> This topic seemd awfully complicated....can anyone simplify it?
Simplify? Maybe not.
There are three common sorts of backup: full, differential, and
incremental. A full backup copies (and can restore) everything. A
differential backup copies only things that have changed since the last
full backup, so to restore you need the last full backup and the latest
differential. An incremental backup copies only things that have
changed since the last (full or incremental) backup, so to restore you
need the last full backup and every incremental since then, in order.
For most people, 100 MB (Zip drive, or LS-120, or similar) is plenty
for a daily differential backup, but a full backup -- which you'd
probably want to make weekly -- could easily run 1-3 GB. Swapping 10-
30 disks and labelling them doesn't sound like a great way to spend
Saturday afternoon.
Tape offers a reasonable range of capacity (DAT is in about the 4GB
range) at reasonable media prices -- but the up-front price of the
drive offsets some of that.
If you're willing to sacrifice a disk to this job, perhaps what you
really want is one drive to "mirror" another. This technique is mostly
used on critical systems using SCSI drives, although I believe there is
an EIDE solution available as well.
As long as you have your original installation disks for your
software -- and any updates you've installed... -- then all you really
have to back up is your personal data and documents. A Zip drive or
equivalent is probably adequate for that. [I believe most home users
pick this choice, but rarely follow through on it.]
It's possible to automate the copying process, but a robotic tape-
changer is very expensive. There are various backup utilities on the
market, whose great advantage over xcopy is that they know how to talk
to tape drives. Their great advantage over Microsoft's DOS/Windows
backup programs is that your old backups don't suddenly become
unreadable when you upgrade to a new OS.
One other feature that special backup utilities may offer: There's
not much fun inrestoring your OS over the copy you had to install in
order to run the backup program. A few utilities have a way to start
the recovery process from a boot floppy without needing to install an
OS.
If backing up were really simple, everyone would do it.
David G
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