19 Nov
2001
19 Nov
'01
8:05 a.m.
Well, I've said this before, but not this week ...
My experience has been that folks who have a backup device, capable of doing a
full scheduled (automatic, without human intervention) system backup of
everything accessible to the system on a single element of the medium the device
uses, always seem to have good backup. That's not true of the guys who have to
swap disks or tapes. It doesn't have to be that way, but history seems to
support the notion that it's a really good thing to keep in mind. For some guys
that means they have to have a library of very large capacity, and, therefore,
cost, but that's the price of having your data secured.
The procedure I use is automatic enough, but terribly time-consuming. It
requires that I deal with the WIndows long file names with a program called
DOSLFNBK, which substitutes DOS-compatible 8.3 names for the longer WINDOWS
filenames, and maintains a lookup table of them. It then backs up to tape, and
then reverses the DOSLFNBK process before the system is once again useable
except under DOS.
more below ...
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ben Franchuk" <bfranchuk(a)jetnet.ab.ca>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, November 19, 2001 10:45 AM
Subject: Re: OT: paging MAC expert(s) --- What's a Performa?
That's not entirely true, since some 3rd party products have "emergency
recovery" or crash recovery procedures that will restore from a backup set
without first reinstalling the OS. Now, moving 875 GB from tape to disk takes a
while and installing Windows, which takes 30-45 minutes, will trim as much as 2
hours off that time, but it's quite a bit safer to restore the last known-good
backup and go from there. Some 3rd party software also specifically includes
backup of the registry, which is key to restoring the system as-is. I really
don't see how they can restore a file without the corresponding registry
entries.
I keep waiting for a current set of doc's for LINUX. However, while the OS
may
be on version 12-something (which it's not) the doc is still on version
0.0-something, (not really the case either) but it's not far into the basic
doc's that one runs into missing key words, like "NOT."
I use Windows, so I can't get by with a small hard disk. By today's standards,
however, a 100GB hard disk is a small one, so maybe one can get by with a small
drive. (Have you tried to buy a new <10GB drive lately?) On that scale, I
guess what I use is considered tiny.
Richard Erlacher wrote:
> There's something about the OS that interferes with a backup. The Microsoft
> Backup for Win98 seems to work ...sorta... but it only works ...sorta... and
> falls down many times, misinterpreting a drive that the OS recognizes
correctly
to be a 2GB
partition to be 300+ Terabytes. Naturally it falls down later
because of that problem. <sigh>
I suspect this was you were never meant to backup the complete system.
Why that might mean somebody could make a illegal copy of windows.
The few backup programs I have looked at but never could afford still
run under DOS and will back up your windows system with out the OS.
There is just too much crap in windows that makes it nearly impossible
to backup. And of course you have to load windows to run a windows
backup.
(Stupid)!
> An OS without a real backup utility is of little use because you have to
have
> backup ... not just copies of things, but a real
backup, context and all,
that
> enables you to get back to where you were. DOS
didn't have that, UNIX
doesn't
> have it (though it does have TAR, which makes
copies to tape), OS/2 doesn't
have
> it, LINUX doesn't have it ... I don't
know what a guy's to do. I guess
> image-copying the disk to tape, empty space and all, is the only solution.
Of
course that
means the files are replaceable only on an all or nothing basis.
^%$#@! ... what a bunch of crap!
Since I have a small HD I do a tar from my boot disk for linux, for the
entire HD to a bunch of Zip disks. A bit messy but I know I recover
the entire OS should my HD fail with tar.
Ben Franchuk.