On (15 Feb 96) Bob Lawrence wrote to Keith Richardson...





 BL> I still think the best backup strategy is:



 BL> 1. Use two hard discs and backup the whole bloody lot every

 BL> week.



 BL> 2. Back up all work onto floppies (2-sets) and spread them

 BL> around.



 KR> i bought a qic-80 tape drive for $199. obviously you cant

 KR> backup a gigabyte size drive with it, but when it comes down to

 KR> it, there really aint a huge amount of irreplaceble data on

 KR> most systems, and you can get several backups of that sort of

 KR> data on 1 350 meg tape. massing the data to be backed up in

 KR> particular sub-directories or partitions makes it a lot easier.



 BL>   For mine, the only point in using a tape backup is when you backup

 BL> the *whole* thing. Data is best kept on floppies unless you generate

 BL> huge amounts of data (your scanned pistures). I don't see much point 

 BL> in having several generations of backup on the *same* tape.



a tape is much more convenient, you just put all your data into easily

defined sub-directories and set up a batch job to back them up. unless

you only have a tiny amount of personal stuff you wont get all of it

onto one floppy, so you'll have to sit and swap floppies where, with the

tape, i can go and do something else while the backup progresses. a 350

meg tape holds quite a few backups so only 2 or 3 will give enough

generations to be fairly sure that you will notice a glitch before the

last good generation is overwritten.



 BL> I don't think there is much you can do to protect against a glitch

 BL> you backup. You still have to find it, so you may as well find it

 BL> on the original install discs, and reinstall.



its ok for the stuff that comes on install disks, i dont bother to back

that up, just the config files, its the stuff that you generate that

wont come back if you dont stash it somewhere. i've been very lucky over

the years, i've hardly lost anything despite the usual system crashes,

but the bushfire the other year made me think, now i can put all the

stuff that i really care about in a briefcase if not my pocket. i'd

rather have a dat tape and just put the whole lot on it, it's much

easier for recovery, but i dont want to spend that much on that just

now, there are other fish to fry.



                        Keith



... You are as free as you are prepared to risk.



--- PPoint 1.92