What am I missing?

From: Jerome Fine <jhfine_at_idirect.com>
Date: Sun Feb 10 11:32:34 2002

>Gary Hildebrand wrote:

> > If I am correct, is there any way to get my point across or is
> > this a Catch-22 situation?
> We had a pC with a dos based program for character generation at the tv
> station I worked at. Program had a nasty habit of corrupting its files
> when you ran out of disk space or memory, causing random hits and making
> life miserable.
> First time I slowly worked through all the hits, and over several days,
> got it to work okay again. Then we got a bigger hard drive. I
> suggested a backup of some sort, but not floppies. Request ignored.
> Second time the file (which was loaded as one gigantic mess) was bigger
> than the 16 meg we had in the machine and caused the same problems.
> Again it took days to work out the bugs. Again I strongly recommended a
> backup system, one easy to use, and was ignored again. Management
> wasn't happy, with the bumpy road for a week, and I said the other
> alternative is to reinstall the software and system from scratch and
> loose ALL the gfx files in the process.
> People will never learn until it goes up in smoke. Then afterwards they
> do what was needed and blame you for not doing it in the first place.
> Doc Daneeka was right telling Yossarian.
> Gary Hildebrand
> ST. Joseph, MO

Jerome Fine replies:

I have also heard the statement: "There is never enough time to do the
job properly in the fix place, but always plenty of time to fix it afterwards!"

Thank you for your reply. It seems like I must stuck to my guns and dictate
what I will do. Unless the "RAID 1" firmware is dramatically improved, there
seems no point in using it. However, the RAID controller can also be used
in "Standard" mode. Since it is using EIDE drives and is connected to a
PCI slot, I find I am achieving a sustained throughput of about 10 MBytes
per second or about 600 MBytes per minute when I copy files from one
of the 40 GBytes hard drives to the other - NOT BAD! This means that
I can copy all of the present 1 GBytes of files (only programs so far - no
data while I am testing) in about 3 minutes from C: drive to D: drive.

Right now, I have started to use Semantic Ghost as the back-up program.
This is a W98 system. Thus far, I can copy from <=> to either:
(a) All files of a drive
(b) Compressed file containing all files of a drive.
Since (b) is compressed about 2 to 1, this means I can fit about 1.2 GBytes
of files from <=> to a drive via a compressed collection that can also fit
on a single CD (and since I now have a CDRW I can burn a CD with that
compressed file - Yippee!!!). As far as I can tell, the Ghost program
preserves ALL file attributes.

Can anyone help with the following. I want to also back-up a subset of the
files to a single CD. I can get around that by doing a complete back-up
of all the files and then deleting all the ones I don't want to include in the
back-up via Ghost to a single file which is them transferred to the CD for
permanent storage. I can then unGhost that single file to an empty disk
drive (I have many 2 GByte SCSI drives). Question: How can I "transfer"
all the files from one drive to my functioning C: drive - including directories -
without losing any file attributes, especially the creation, last modified and
last accessed dates? Is there any W98 software to do that?
Received on Sun Feb 10 2002 - 11:32:34 GMT