I can't resist giving my 2 cents worth.  The huge advantage of swappable
drives is price / performance, given the current cost of megabytes.  The
HUGE disadvantage is you keep only one backup.
Tape is not for everyone, but I go with 4mm DAT tape.  Backs up 4 gigs in 3
hours, I know, slow slow slow, but by then I'm sound asleep, and I have
over 2 dozen tapes of all kinds of interesting stuff.  My system doesn't
allow quick tape browsing at the file level, but there are some that do.
 Seagate has a system that allows browsing a tape like it was a hard disk.
 It takes 2 to 10 minutes to restore a database, and my databases range
from 30 meg to 140 meg.  There is no limit to how much you can backup
because volumes can span multiple tapes.  As for reliablility I throw out
tapes when the backup software warns the tape has retries and I have never
lost anything due to tape error.  The my drive connects to a standard
SCSI-2 50 pin adapter, if you have a SCSI drive like I do you can even work
comfortably while the backup is in progress, except that most systems won't
backup files you  currently have open or are editing.

Admittedly, full restores of OLTP can't wait 3 hours, so any mission
critical stuff should be on a backup server or raid.  I use a backup
server.  For personal use, my biggest obstacle to using backup drives is
Murphy's law, junk expands to fit all available space, so now you have 2
drives to backup.
tom turak
[log in to unmask]

----------
From:   Al Anger[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Wednesday, February 25, 1998 6:47 AM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Re: [PCBUILD] Wonderful backup

In our last episode
Arnie Robuck <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>I think you are going way to far right for what you want to do. The
>quickest, easiest and cheapest way to a complete backup of your system is
to
>use a tape.

Sorry, I have to disagree with that entire statement.  Tape is slower
than copying to another drive. The restore is -way- slower and much more
work. First you need to reinstall the OS, then the backup. Plus I don't
fully trust the tape medium.

I fully copy to my back-up drive in about 6 1/2 min. (1.2 gig).
To restore, swap the drives.

Granted, I have made it very easy by using swapable drive bays (approx.
$25 each) and Drive Copy (which I bata tested for PQ) which is much
quicker than xcopy. And the copy is 'ready to run'. No need to set
active partition, bla bla bla...

To restore my system,

1. Unlock and swap drives
2. Power up.

System restored in under 1 min.

The key to any backup system is however, how long ago did you last make
that backup? When you can back-up in under 7 min (in my case, YMMV) by
running one DOS program, One is more likely to have a current, viable
back-up.

HTH
Al Anger

For better or worse, I wrote my life story;
some blame is mine, and so to, some glory.