did i mention backup,,,,
i woke yesterday morning to my automation computer being dead and me off the air where i remained the whole day while i put in a new hard drive and reloaded and resheduled everything from scratch!!!!
i recommend getting cloning software such as clonezilla and a extra hard drive and that you clone your c drive to the extra hard drive so if you ever wake up to the hard drive going tick, tick, tick like i did all you have to do is replace the drive with the back up real quick and get back to doing what we do.
lesson learned.
i will be heading to microcenter soon to buy a couple extra drives to keep as backups with a cloned copy of my system drive(s) on my two computers so i will only have few minutes down time vs a whole day next time.
I was just thinking the other day about how wonderful my system is. It almost never crashes, and I have yet to experience a total system collapse.
That means it will happen soon and "feeling lucky" won't save the day.
Robert, I will take your advice and have that clone drive ready to go.
Robert is giving good advice. I have been working with computer systems large and small since 1967 (two of them had vacuum tubes) and some used punched paper tape as backup medium but even with such primitive hardware the need for backup was evident.
From the beginning of the PC age until now I have tried several backup methods and what works best for me is to have the operating system on a small disc or partition (60 GB partition of which about 20 GB is typically used)and data on a large disc (2 TB). Backup is then done by imaging the operating system disc to an external hard drive which takes eight minutes. The data disc backup is done by simply copying changed or new files and folders as an incremental backup to a large external drive.
Be aware that there is a difference between disc cloning and disc imaging and I recommend imaging.
I recommend against using programs which do incremental backup for the operating system since all I have tried have had errors and failed to do a proper restore.
Whatever backup method you use, be sure to do a test restore to a spare drive. A backup is useless unless you can restore the data and even some name brand backup software has failed to restore. Don't wait until a failure to find out if the restore works. The OS image method restore is fast and can restore a system in less than ten minutes if the data is kept on a separate disc with no need to reinstall anything. If the data storage is small enough then it can be kept on the same physical system disc in a separate partition and backup can also be done by imaging the data partition.
Be aware than an image backup of the operating system will usually not restore to a new or different PC due to hardware differences and the OS will have to be built from a new OS install with application software newly installed. The data, if kept separate, will restore to new hardware and this is one reason the OS and data should be kept separate.
I use Seagate DiscWizard which came free with a hard drive I bought and it lacks some nice features but it gets the job done. More features can be had if you purchase the Acronis backup software which Seagate uses.
Describing my backup methods took longer than doing the backups but I hope some of the tips which I have shared will be helpful.
Neil
I use Apple macs exclusively (I'm forced to use some PC's at work). For the past several years Macs have come with "Time Machine" as part of the system. Simply plug in an external drive and turn on Time Machine. Tell it how often you'd like it to back up (hourly, daily, weekly, etc) and relax. It takes care of itself in the background -- you don't even know it's happening. You can, with a click of the mouse, restore a system, install the whole shebang in a different computer, or just go back an hour to retrive something you deleted by accident 5 minutes ago.
I have it on 5 computers, my Mac in my office at work (I buy my own so I'm not forced to use a PC in my office) my personal computer in my office at home, my station automation computer, my production studio Macbook computer at home, and I back up my daughters macbook when she comes home to visit so she has an off-site backup. I've never had to recover from a crash, however, as in 21 years I've never had a Mac fail. However, my Daughters laptop got damaged in a fire (the water putting out the house fire did more damage to the computer than the fire did). It would still start up and run but the keyboard was pretty screwed up -- insurance bought her a new one and we plugged in the external Time Machine drive, it asked us it we wanted to put that data into this computer, we clicked "yes" and less than an hour she had a new laptop with everything that was in her old one, right down to settings, preferences, passwords and all the rest.
I do plug in a different drive every week or so and do another backup with a drive I keep off site for my home office and the automation computers, so in case of fire of theft, I still have most of it.
Tim in Bovey