[WriteLog] Of RAID, Drives, warranties, and reliability... (long)

[Ron Stordahl]

I have just caught the tail end of this discussion so go easy on me!

With respect to contesting, I recall that CT wrote a 'log' or perhaps we
could call it a journal to a floppy which could be used to recover in case
of failure.  I always ran that, it even interfered with my CW generation
(when it wrote to the floppy) on the old clunker I was using at the time.
Fortunately I never had to recover.

Ill admit to my ignorance, but apparently Writelog does not provide a
recovery journal?

With regard to backups in general, of course we should all be doing them.
But few do.  For myself I have a second hard drive in most of my machines,
and I occasionally (probably too infrequently) copy my important data to the
second drive.  But it's not automated, I would like to know how to do that.
Since I keep some of my machines on 24/7 I don't see how it would be
possible as critical files will remain assigned to their tasks and either
cannot be accessed or would not be in a stable state to be copied.

For my most important data,  my ham log (HI), I copy it nearly daily to a
little USB 128MB drive I keep on my key chain.  I do this for convenience in
transferring to another machine, but it has also served as backup when I
needed it.

I know the value of regular complete backups...at my company this is done by
high speed tape, we store it all in a walk-in safe and it's been invaluable.
Yet I fail to do this on my personal systems, unless this can be automated
it won't happen.

Ron N5IN


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Reisert AD1C" <jjreisert at alum.mit.edu>
To: <writelog at contesting.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 9:53 AM
Subject: Re: [WriteLog] Of RAID, Drives, warranties, and reliability...
(long)


> I just want to add my 2 cents about warrenties.
>
> No drive manufacturer is going to warrenty your DATA, only the drive
hardware
> itself.  It's up to YOU to have a copy of your critical data somewhere
else in
> case the drive ever fails.
>
> I have been very lucky -- I have not lost a drive myself, but I tend to
upgrade
> every two-three years.  In the shack, I use Iomega Automatic Backup to
save
> copies of my logbook to a ZIP disk every time a file changes.  In the home
> office, I do a nightly automated backup to an identical hard drive.  All
of
> this started, incidentally, in the last year or so.  I had been living on
the
> edge up until now.
>
> There's a line from the movie "Tommy Boy" about guarantees that I won't
repeat
> here.  If you've see the movie, you know what I'm talking about.
>
> 73 - Jim AD1C
>
>
> =====
> Jim Reisert AD1C, 7 Charlemont Court, North Chelmsford, MA 01863
> USA +978-251-9933, <jjreisert at alum.mit.edu>, http://www.ad1c.com
> PGP Fingerprint: D8E2 3D78 339F A7F1 8C13  1193 B5D1 4FB6 79D1 70DC
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