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Date:	Fri, 9 Mar 2001 22:20:37 PST
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: Re: IDE Tape

Content Type: text/plain

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Sandy Shapiro wrote:
>
> I went to Hobbes, but there was just old stuff.

Sandy, how much data do you want to back up? It's cheaper to buy an
additional IDE drive that can hold a *copy* of all your files than it is
to buy a new tape drive, tapes and tape backup software. (Back
Again/2000 can back up to a hard drive, and xcopy can copy "all files"
to a hard drive. Back Again/2000 has compression while xcopy does not.)

To back up to a hard drive, I use "xcopy d:\* /h/o/t/s/e/r/v". As with
all incremental backups, files which you delete will remain on the
backup drive, and files which you rename will appear on the backup drive
as both the old name and as the new name. I run a "dir /s >files.log"
before every backup so I know which files are supposed to be restored,
and every once in a while I delete everything on the backup drive and
start fresh to get rid of archived files I no longer want.

I've heard that xcopy sometimes doesn't complete because it encounters
an error condition. I've never had this happen, but I guard this
situation with a \ZZBACKUP subdirectory into which I echo a file which
has the current date-time stamp. At the end of the backup, if that file
hasn't been xcopy'd to the backup drive I know something went wrong. So
far it's never happened.

If you want to store your backups offsite, buy a slide-out drawer for
the IDE drive. If you're really into this, buy two IDE backup drives
and two drawers, and you can keep one off-site while the other is in the
machine.

You need backup for two reasons: to "archive" data that you no longer
need online but might need some day in the future, and for disaster
recovery (i.e. your machine gets swiped, your hard drive crashes, you
accidentally delete a file, or you need to restore your .ini files).

Backing up to a hard drive is more expensive when you have a huge amount
of data (for example if you collect all the Hubble images or something)
or if you use a large number of tapes in a rotation scheme, but for
simple backups of 10 GB or so it's cheaper to use xcopy and back up to a
hard drive.

- Peter

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