[WriteLog] Hard Drive Failure, THANKS

[Gary Ferdinand W2CS]

I'll toss in one further comment to the excellent input given here.

"Just" having nightly (or whatever) backups in my mind is necessary, but not
sufficient.  I need to have some degree of protection against myself!  There
is an entire class of screwup, be it caused by me or caused by some errant
component in my system, that might lie undetected for a relatively long
period of time.   While you can't guard against everything and do reach a
point of diminishing returns, I routinely keep rotating quarterly backups in
addition to the backups taken more frequently.

I'm trying to guard against one backup (containing undetected, logically bad
data) overlaying a good backup (containing the original data) and my merrily
thinking all is well...

73,

Gary W2CS


> -----Original Message-----
> From: writelog-bounces at contesting.com
> [mailto:writelog-bounces at contesting.com]On Behalf Of Bill Turner
> Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2004 10:03 AM
> To: writelog at contesting.com
> Subject: Re: [WriteLog] Hard Drive Failure, THANKS
>
>
> On Thu, 8 Jul 2004 12:12:29 -0000, Robert McGwier wrote:
>
> >Life is too short and I can afford a full raid disk, and excellent
> >back up, and a high quality UPS much more readily than I can afford
> >to lose exactly 1/10 of my life's work.
>
> _________________________________________________________
>
> I see you've been given some good suggestions on how to back up your
> data, but the method many IT professionals recommend has not been
> mentioned:  drive imaging.
>
> If you're not aware of it, an image of your drive is one or more large
> files which contains every bit of information on your drive, including
> the OS, boot sector, data, everything.  If and when you need to restore,
> you get a complete, identical copy of your HD.  You don't have to
> re-install the OS or any programs or tweak any settings.  It will be
> restored exactly like it was when you imaged it.  I have had to do t his
> a couple of times and it works perfectly.
>
> I use Norton Ghost because of it's simple boot disk operation but there
> are others such as Power Quest's Drive Image.  You can create the image
> either on a second HD or a set of CDs.  I don't know if DVDs can be used
> or not - I don't have a DVD burner so I haven't looked into it, but I
> suspect it is possible.
>
> Just some food for thought.
>
> --
> Bill, W6WRT
> QSLs via LoTW
>
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