You can restore directly from a dat4 tape, using NT recovery diskettes,
which will load the scsi and device drivers.  Tape is transportable,
convenient, reasonably fast, high capacity, cheap if you stay at a 4/8 gig
(dds2) or 6/12 gig (dds3) model, and does perfect file restores, meaning you
can restore to any disk, either original or blank.  It will restore nt over
itself, which is cool, and backup over networks are cool, kind of tougher
with cdrw.  Restoring win9x or me over a network from tape is problematic,
in my experience.  I went to MS website and downloaded network stuff for
doing it, had one win9x boot diskette with cd and network drivers that
worked, but could never get another one made.  Each boot diskette is good
for only one model of network card, by the method I was using, (someone
might know a better way).  NT4 (and i suppose 2000) does not have this
trouble, and you can configure boot diskettes with network drivers.  You can
load basic op sys over the network (we do)or from cd and then restore full
system file backup from tape (not mirror) over that, or restore entire tape
to blank disk.

Having defended tape, I still like cdrw better. More versatile, easily
restores op sys for win9x, and plays music cds in its spare time.  But if
you make a lot of backups, and you want to use your systems while they do
it, and you don't want to fool around with configuring software or
monitoring it while it runs, get a cheap dat4 drive.  It takes about 6 mouse
clicks to launch a full backup, runs fine unattended, and in nt you can
schedule it to run as a service every night. It doesn't tie up your system,
although it does have a minor performance hit on my server if you're using
it as a console, but not on the drives if you're accessing them over the
network.

The trouble I have always had with backing up to a hard drive, is Murphy's
Law, "you have as many files as you have room to store them", and the
_backup_ drive becomes, swiftly, a primary data drive.  The other problem is
they only store one copy, and I have seen people restore from their spare
hard disk to find the same (bad) version in the backup, of everything that
they were trying to replace.  Keep in mind a catastrophic hard disk failure
is one of the rarest uses of backups.  More frequently you just want to roll
back to a problem-free version.
Tom Turak


-----Original Message-----
From: Frank R. Brown [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2001 7:45 AM

First off, thanks for everyone's suggestions.

I guess I'm getting talked into using a hard drive and something
like second copy 2000 or xxcopy for backing up data files.

Since some of the machines I want to back up are laptops,
the plan of adding a second hard drive to the machine and
running ghost --- instant recovery by simply switching over
to booting off the second drive --- doesn't seem practical.

What whole-machine backup solutions might I want to look
at, and do they really work?

Let's say I have a laptop and use ghost to a network drive
(or use ntbackup to a tape drive).  Let's say I lose my
hard drive, and replace it, possibly with one of larger capacity.
How do I do a whole-machine restore?  Do I need to do a
plain-vanilla install of the os (I use nt) to get things going, and
then the restore procedure overwrites the temporary copy of
the os?

As John Chin <[log in to unmask]> said,
"Learning how to tell the wheat from chaff on a Windows system
takes time."  (I call this the windows file-splatter disease.)
It seems to me you either really do a true, complete whole-
machine restore, or you don't do it at all.

Have people perhaps found reinstalling the os, the apps, and
then recovering desired data files to be the more practical solution?

            Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                   http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml