Post
by MikeC » Fri Dec 03, 2004 12:22 am
This is what I have been using for a couple of years & it works great.
1) I use 2 internal HDDs -- one holds the OS and all programs; the other holds My Docs (obviously this is a Windows system -- XP Pro). I have renamed/placed all the data to go into My Docs in the D drive, including Web bookmarks, email folders, addresses, etc.
2) I use two external USB2/firewire HDDs to back up each drive completely.
For the OS drive, I don't do this often -- basically only when I make major changes to the OS or programs. I use Norton Ghost to clone the drive. It happens fast enough; for well under 20G, it's maybe half an hour? I make a real clone, an exact duplicate. I even use the same brand/model of HDD.
For the Data drive, I use SecondCopy2000 which is a great backup utility, to maintain a duplicate copy of My Documents on another external drive. I have about 35G of data. The first backup took a while but after that, it's incremental and only tackles changes to keep the original and the backup the same. This backup is done nightly -- just before i go to bed, I start the backup and go to bed.
The external drives are unplugged and turned off when not in use. When I go away for any length of time, I put them in my bank safety deposit box.
The beauty of this system is that if anything goes wrong with either of the main drives, I simply shut down the PC, take out the affected drive, and replace it with the clone. With no compression, there's no messing with restoration, and it's utterly transparent using the simplest Windows tools to see if the backup drive is working and the files not corrupted.
I have only had occasion to need this once or twice, but it saved my bacon. It's also really handy when migrating from one computer to another.
When I first started doing this, it seemed like an expensive system, HDDs were not cheap, and I neither were external drives. I used those removable HDD racks for a while. But now, firewire external boxes are cheap and so are HDDs.
I don't think there's a better way for sheer security and ease of real uncompressed clones of all the data (incld the OS & programs) in your hard drives.[/i]