[SEL] O.T. Computer Help - Not Down

Peter A Forbes diesel at easynet.co.uk
Sun Jul 18 00:25:02 PDT 2004


On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 17:47:21 -0500, you wrote:

>Ok you computer guru's I need your help again.

<snipped>

>Paul

OK, there are two or three ways to do a backup, but if you want to be able to
access them at any time and without going through hoops then you need to just
copy complete drives or folders over to the backup medium.

Ordinary backups use compression techniques to write one large file to a backup
medium which has to be unscrambled if you want to see a particular file. This
requires the original backup programme as well.

We backup to a second hard drive inside the computer, then once a fortnight we
write all our files to a DVD. Both these backups are straight file copies, so we
can look at the DVD with Windows Explorer (Not Internet Explorer) and pick any
file(s) out that we want. The second hard drive is a 40gb unit which 'only'
holds backups, and is used for nothing else.

We use Nero 6 for writing CD's and DVD's, and it includes a 'proper' backup
programme, but you cannot read the files with anything else, so we dropped that
straight away. We write the backups across the network to one of the machines
with a DVD writer, and with all the network machines running we can back up the
whole lot in about an hour or so, about 10gb.

The other thing to remember is that for quick backups you need to locate all
your files in a couple of folders so you can find them and back them up quickly.
We back up our email programme folder (Agent) our pictures folder, our webpages
folder and a couple of others.

The other thing we do is to regularly make up an emergency repair disk so if we
have a system crash we can restore the system using Win2KPro's built-in recovery
process. I think XP has this as well.

Peter
(Posted at 08.24am UK BST Sunday)

--
Peter & Rita Forbes
diesel at easynet.co.uk
Engine pages for preservation info:
http://www.oldengine.org/members/diesel



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