I'm not sure there's a "fault" here. I certainly wouldn't blame you for wanting to do a proper backup. Well, if a drive fails completely, just unplug one, and if the system still boots, you've unplugged the failed unit ;) Personally, I'd recover to a "spare" disk, and try that disk out afterwards. No reason to possibly trash a more-or-less working installation if the recovery fails the first time. Otherwise it sounds reasonable. I think this is the windows mindset. "We can always re-build the entire system, data files and all (since our data files will all be corrupt by then) once a month or so." Some people tell me that they've had better luck with windows than this, of course, YMMV. The point is that after losing so much data to poor practices -- on the part of the user, and the people who wrote the o/s -- what's there to be afraid of? Taken a step further, what's the point in a backup at all? That's not my attitude, but I've seen it. It also seems that most "new" system management types consider backups to simply be an annoyance, and more often than not will do anything possible to get out of having to restore anything... I try not to do business with people who have such poor data management practices... Had you given the name of the business, this would have probably kept me away from them for life. Wait until there is a failure and they actually need a backup. Announce that you have a backup, indeed, but it only contains 9000 copies of a file called README. :) Chris Christopher Smith, Perl Developer Amdocs - Champaign, IL /usr/bin/perl -e ' print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n"); '