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Date:	Sat, 3 Aug 2002 07:51:56 PST7
From:	Harry Chris Motin <hmotin@attglobal.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: Re: Drive Image Backups

Content Type: text/plain

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Sandy,

I am responding to several of the issues you raised here. My responses,
below, may be a repeat of what I and others have said before, but I
think that its important:

1. Your history of how you made backups follows mine pretty closely. I
started with a tape drive and BackMaster. I agree with you that the
tapes wear out after 1 or 2 years. After that the tape drive goes south!
Also, backing up to tapes is slooooow!

2. Later, I switched to Back Again 2000 and the Iomega 1GB Jaz drive.
That was pretty good. The Jaz drive was almost as fast as a dedicated
hard drive. However, the Jaz drive disks and drives unit were expensive.
After about 2 years the drive unit stopped working. It was too expensive
to repair or replace, compared to a dedicated hard drive.

3. Now I use Back Again 2000 and a hard drive. And that is primarily
why I'm writing. I don't understand your comment, below, that Back Again
2000 does not work as smoothly with hard drives as it does tapes. I
believe that it does, because that's how I use it. You can designate a
specific hard drive as your backup unit, just like you do for a tape
unit. Hard drives are cheap and the fastest backup choice. If it's big
enough in size, you can save several backup generations before erasing.
You can even configure your system with removable hard drives, use them
for backups and then remove them for storage elsewhere. That's the
ultimate in speed, cost, convenience and safety, I think!

As Steven has previously stated, you can use Back Again 2000 and its
commandline interface, a REXX script and hard drives to backup your
system in an automated fashion. The script should accept your input for
the name of each backup file, *.DAT, that you want to create. The script
should automatically put the date in as part of the filename. You can
have the script present you with a menu choice for selecting the name of
each backup file.

You can easily overcome the 2.1GB file limit, when backing up to a
HPFS-formatted hard drive. Do the following:

A. Use full compression in your backups
B. Save each backup to its own *.DAT file
C. Break up your full system backup into 2 or more smaller ones.
Place all the essential OS/2 system files and apps on one backup, so
that you can use it to successufully recover from a full crash. Place
the other, non-essential stuff on the other *.DAT files

Hope this helps!

HCM
______________________________________________________________________________

Sandy Shapiro wrote:
>
> =====================================================
> If you are responding to someone asking for help who
> may not be a member of this list, be sure to use the
> REPLY TO ALL feature of your email program.
> =====================================================
>
> I have been following the discussion in this thread with great interest.
>
> I have been using tapes for backups for many years -- first with
> Backmaster for OS/2, and more recently with BackAgain 2000. I like being
> able to boot from a floppy and restore a single file from a tape on those
> occasions when I really screw up.
>
> The problem with tape is that after about one year, the tapes become
> unreliable, and after about two years, the tape drives become unreliable.
>
> I am intrigued by the idea of using removable hard drives instead of
> tapes. I did some experimenting with BackAgain 2000, and that is a
> possible solution. But BA 2K doesn't work as smoothly with hard drives as
> it does with tapes.
>
> I would like to know what other software solutions people have found where
> you can back up to a hard drive under OS/2 using compression and can
> restore a single file, when necessary.
>
> Thanks,
> Sandy
>
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