Re: Backups - Tapes or more HDD's
- From: "Martin Underwood" <me@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:15:26 -0000
"M.I.5¾" <no.one@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:45ffd170$1_1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
All good and wise stuff. But have you actually checked to see if you can
really restore your backup? Remember: that the restore utility may not be
easily accesible if you loose the disk which you so carefully backed up.
There are (as I said) at least 101 other things that can go wrong.
A friend of mine backs up using Trueimage (a generally reliable backup
tool). When he lost his hard disk, he bought a new one and proceeded to
restore his trueimage backup using the bootable CD restore utility he
thoughtfully made as part of the installation process. He discovered that
for some reason that we totally failed to fathom out, that his PC always
randomly froze when running the CD restore utility at some point during
the restore (runs under a sort of mini Linux, I believe). We ended up
connecting his new hard disk to my laptop and restoring using that
(successfully - once we tumbled that you have to manually add the MBR).
Well I backup using file-copying technology rather than disk-imaging or tape
backup, so there isn't the extra stage of being able to decypher the backup:
if the files are visible on the disk after backing up, then they are
probably OK. Maybe I should go one stage further and periodically compare
the disk and backup copies (eg using WinDiff) at various times in the
future - apart from any files which are known to have changed since the
backup was made, there should be no difference.
I suppose I could go one stage further and take a Ghost image of the whole
drive so as to be able to restore the drive to the state it was in when I
took the snapshot. In practice, I've not suffered a catastrophic failure (eg
of an HDD) - it's more usually individual files which get corrupted or
accidentally deleted. I made the fatal mistake of overwriting a good but out
of date backup of my emails with a later state in which a few files had got
corrupted by Outlook Express's Folder Compaction. I had three separate
copies on different disks and I overwrote them all one after the other. What
a plonker! Now I always backup before compaction, then compact and check
that the OE folders are readable afterwards and then backup again from
known-good files.
This is fine for home use and a small self-employed business where there's
just a customer database and emails about progress of calls, but if it was
mission-critical I'd maybe take even more care. Certainyl I'm spreading the
risk - which is a lot more than most of my customers do! They think I'm
paranoid when I say "have you got a backup of all those photos on your
laptop - what if it gets stolen?".
.
- References:
- Backups - Tapes or more HDD's
- From: Simon Dobson
- Re: Backups - Tapes or more HDD's
- From: M.I.5¾
- Re: Backups - Tapes or more HDD's
- From: Martin Underwood
- Re: Backups - Tapes or more HDD's
- From: M.I.5¾
- Backups - Tapes or more HDD's
- Prev by Date: Re: Backups - Tapes or more HDD's
- Next by Date: Re: USB 2 or 1
- Previous by thread: Re: Backups - Tapes or more HDD's
- Next by thread: Re: Backups - Tapes or more HDD's
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
|
