D'oh! Backup issue solved

From: Jerome Fine <jhfine_at_idirect.com>
Date: Sun Sep 3 09:28:18 2000

>Douglas Quebbeman wrote:

> > It used to be that one could do backups on a home-based system. However,
> > softare to handle the backups just doesn't seem to be there. It's not
> > complicated, so one could, I suppose, roll-yer-own.
> My solution has been to abandon backups, and to create archives instead.
> When possible, I try to extract from the running system any configuration
> info I'd need to get back to where I was, and include that in the archive
> as well.

Jerome Fine replies:

I have attempted to combine the archive aspect with a full backup in my
own situation that may also be of interest. I understand, however, that
my own solution may not be practical for everyone else, but here it is.

I was able to acquire a sufficient number of ESDI drives at a very low
cost to allow me to use them on a real PDP-11 system. At one point,
I even started to use a 1.2 GByte Hitachi DK516-15 drive, but have
never been able to get them to work properly with the Sigma
RQD11-EC quad controllers. But on the PC system, I find they
are great. And since I archive as must of the stuff that does not change
as needed, I still have almost 300 MBytes free. Every other day, I
simply use "Explorer" (yes I am ashamed to admit I am on W95 - ugh)
to copy all the files from the primary drive to a spare drive which I
rotate around every 10 days (with a total of 3 drives for the month) so as
to keep at least within a 1 1/2 week period of keeping all files up to
date. I realize that this means getting inside the case all the time to
physically change the hard drives, but so far it has worked fairly
well.

> But backing up home systems in situ is problematic, since you generally
> have to have a running system from which to restore the backup anyway.

By having a complete backup on drive D:, that is not a problem. It does
mean that I must add the terminating resistor and switch the drive ID
number if it is to become drive C:, but I don't need to do that operation
more than once a year when I do something special.

Meanwhile, when my primary drive went belly up about a year ago,
I was fortunate to be able to just add the terminating resistor to the
latest backup and just carry on. The only thing I lost was the dates
on the directories since whenever the C: drive is copied to the D:
drive, the current date is used on the directories, but the original
date (last date modified) is still kept on all the other files.

Just a suggestion, probably impractical for most of you.

Sincerely yours,

Jerome Fine
Received on Sun Sep 03 2000 - 09:28:18 BST

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