Re: Warning: Oblivion deletes your characters on uninstall

Thus spake Zaghadka <zaghadka@xxxxxxxxxxx>, Wed, 10 May 2006 19:18:55 -0500,
Anno Domini:

Disk redundancy & file system/data backups are like comparing gays with
lesbians - only a moron would mistake one for the other.

But they're both homosexuals.

(Don't know how that fits the metaphor, I just thought I'd point it out.)

I'm leaving it alone now too.

I'm interested in your experiences. I almost never ran into data failure, in my
10 year stint in IT. Backups were catastrophe insurance, and it always stunned
me how much of a PAIN it was to restore a single missing file from a tape. It
was like backup software designers wanted you to suffer for using a
comprehensive backup to retrieve something so small. I hope it's gotten better
in the past 5 years.

Not really, but you've hit the nail on the head. I can't remember how many
times an idjit user has deleted/overwritten critical corporate data &
required a painful 2-6 hr tape restore;

You can call them "lusers" if you like. I won't be offended. Though one of my
SM IT bosses deemed the word "user" (no typo) politically incorrect and
insisted we call them "clients." The term "client-server relationship" took on
whole new meanings. ;^)

He, he. Not that the SM Idjit would know a client from a server. There's
that gay metaphor itching to jump out again ;).

or how many times I've done it on my
home system & reloaded a file inside 5 mins. The difference of course is the
sheer volume of data involved & that makes not taking personal backups even
more unforgivable in my books.

Of course, but only of critical data. I use a combination of Windows XP CD
Writing Wizard and my wife's 1 GB jump drive for that, but that's far from a
comprehensive backup.

Hey, I use Nero BackIT & then burn it to a DVD-RW every week *blush*.

On the matter of comprehensive *home* backup, however, I do think you're a
little overboard. The only time I've ever had serious data loss on my *home*
system was because of buggy maintenance software corrupting my hard drive.

See above - the comparative effort to the pain of NOT having them is well
worth it imo.

I think you've overestimated the pain, period. I'm guessing it's an imagined
pain. It's really not that bad once you get over the sinking feeling of a hard
drive going *poof*. Certainly not as bad as an IT fire.

Or a house fire, sure. Except I have a lot of my own intellectual property
sitting on my box(es) which I really should stick in a vault somewhere one
of these days.

I once lost the FAT on my primary data partition due to an error in Norton
Image, then rebooted into XP by mistake which promptly "fixed" it all by
truncating data all across the entire partition before I could recover by using
Norton Unformat to attach an older, but mostly accurate FAT. How's that for a
dumb way to lose data?

He, he. Did you have a 2nd system? What if you hadn't?

Nope, I didn't. I just booted and recovered with UnFormat, once I'd figured out
how all the redundant failsafes I had been using worked. ;^)

I run a small system partition, two applications partitions (one larger one for
games) and a data partition. C, D, E and F. Now I have G for XPs files, but C
is still my boot partition.

My data partition (F) is the one that quit. I could still boot quite easily,
and if the boot partition had gone, I have an image of my boot partition on my
data partition, which is on a different physical drive.

Norton Ghost gives me a bootable system in 10 minutes. I transfer a version to
a bootable CD every now and then for a failsafe.

I should do something similar one of these days. I surely have enough space
with 2 160Gb drives to manage my partitions a bit better. Anything reliable
& safe you can recommend to do it on the fly?
I also d/led a great little package the other day which does a complete XP
SP2 unattended install, along with a mass of apps you pick up front. Very
nice :)

(Lesson learned: The only time I've ever had to use a backup FAT image from
Norton image was because Norton Image crashed while messing with the FAT table
while backing it up. Irony and Catch 22. Watch out, NDD will Image your drive
after a defrag in some versions!

I stay as far away as possible from Norton tools these days. Clue #1.

Gone and banished since the year 2000. Clue long since taken. What the heck
happened to Symantec?

Damn shame.

And never let XP touch a Fat32 drive with its "Scandisk" program, it's a
butcher. Tries to make things pretty at the expense of annihilating any
possibility of data recovery.)

Never use FAT32 in XP when NTFS is available. Clue #2.

I'm a retrogamer, which means I need a working copy of Windows 98/ME and
sometimes DOS. I multiboot with System Commander.

It's your e-life ;)

Never in my wildest imagination did I think that MS's basic Scandisk in XP
would so royally screw up a volume though. It's amazing. It's like they were
trying to punish dual-booters. All I can say is keep XP Scandisk away from your
Fat32 partitions if you have 'em.

What was that company again?

Because of my unique needs, my C drive booter is a FAT, D (applications) and E
(games) are Fat32 and F (data) and G (XP) are NTFS. The NTFS is all on one 60
GB drive and the FAT partitions are all on a 40 GB drive. The computer can
operate without the NTFS entirely, and that FAT/FAT32 drive can be installed on
some older iron for some serious retro involving actual SoundBlaster cards,
etc.

Personally, I would've got a cheap 386/486 at a swap meet, but that's just
me.

As you can see, backing up gets a little weird in such a situation. However, I
find the multipartition approach much stabler than Microsofts "einen partition
uber alles" strategy. For one thing, I fear no virus because my executables are
rarely on the same partition as my data. I can FDISK most virus problems away,
if I ever have one.

A bit drastic, but yes, I can see that. One could make a case that better
management of what you d/l & run would better serve, but then that would be
using your argument against you :)

End result: I grabbed my one CD backup of critical data, shed a brief tear for
my MP3 and South Park collection, and found out it was easy to rebuild almost
everything I had lost, over time, as I needed it.

Life goes on...

Having lived through a catastrophe, I consider complete home backups to be a
solution akin to building and furnishing an entire second house as fire
insurance. It's great, but it's too costly unless you are at the enterprise
level. Just as the second house requires maintenance, a comprehensive backup
requires testing. Such robust practices are unnecessary, and take too much
time, for the home user.

Did I nor say that once set up, it just runs automagically & all I do is
drag & drop the whole lot onto a DVD-RW once a week - 5 min time investment.

Not bad. I missed the title of this software at some point. Would you mind
repeating yourself?

See above - Nero BackIT *blush again*. Comes with own scheduler, though
changing backup sets to add/remove files is a bit clunky. If you only have a
handful of dirs where all your data resides, it's a piece of cake.

I think it's well worth it. Forget h/ware failure or fire or plane crash on
your house for a moment. Think burglary/vandalism. It's probably 10 times
more likely to happen to *YOU* than the others, or how likely you think it
is. Can't insure your data. Clue #3.

Can't insure your identity. Clue #4.

The smallest consequence of a computer bugulary is data loss. I just don't keep
anything all that critical on my system in the first place.

Which is where we differ somewhat...

Do you have that much truly *irreplaceable* data on your home system?

It's my story & I'm stickin to it!
Many, many work files, personal docs, all my financial data, personal dev
projects, contact lists, cd-keys & license files...just off the top of my
head as I type this from work.

As an alternative, I use Spinrite 6 to tell me if a drive is fishy. Run
Spinrite every quarter instead of a comprehensive backup every week or month.
Backup my documents and financials to a 1GB jump drive or DVD-RW.

The other way is killing a fly with a hand grenade.

I'm using a double-barrel shotgun if you want to stretch the metaphor ;).

I don't understand.

I manage my hardware to a degree as well as take paranoia backups. ;)

--
Nostromo
.

Relevant Pages

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