RE: Re: Will I ever learn !!

["Tony Butler" <tony@xxxxxxx>]

> Unless you automate your backup, chances are you will never
> have everything backed up in the event of system failure (or
> in this case anything... hehe).

I whole heartedly agree - I have had various backup devices in my PC's
over the years and, apart from testing that they worked when installed,
I rarely did a backup - and, inevitably, lost a few machines along the
way :(

> Spend a little more and go for a RAID (mirror) system (or
> upgrade to one) since at least this provides a decent level
> of fault protection and gets you up and running after system
> failure in a small amount of time with very little effort
> towards the backup on your part.

The problem with this, (and it is the solution I use now), is that it
offers no protection against the system becoming corrupt - either due to
a virus/new proggie/new hardware crashing things, or turning off without
shutting down properly etc etc.

So you can still completely bugger up your system.

I have a hardware raid solution and when I downgraded from Win2k to Win
XP (why oh why?) I 'lost' my D: drive, which was a partition on the
RAIDed drives.
This is _with_ the correct drivers etc installed.  I did manage to get
to the data & copy it all to the C: partition, so now I have 1/2 the
space I did because I can't face wiping the machine and sticking Win2K
back on. :-(

If only I had a tape streamer and backed up the machine before the
upgrade :(

Indeed, if I'd had my thinking head on that day, I could have broken the
mirror, upgraded one disk, and when that was pants, re-established the
mirror and overwritten the kacky XP installation - DOH!


Tony