On Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:10:13 -0000, William Sommerwerck wrote:

"Heinz Schmitz" wrote in message
...
William Sommerwerck wrote:

Incidentally, nobody does backups until AFTER they've lost
a massive amount of data and correspondly massive amount
of time and money.

Not I. I back up my hard drive periodically. When W2K "collapsed"
several years, I had full backup and lost nothing.

... only the time to reinstall every single program. Does your backup
care for the bookmarks of your browser, the mails of your emailer and
so forth, which all happily sit somewhere else than in the "My Data"
directory?

The only real thing is a disk imager, working and tested -- for your
OS, the hard disk size you use, and the file system you have :-).
To have an incremental backup, too, would be fine.

When I said "full backup", I meant full backup. I use Copy Commander 9.1.
Unlike Ghost (and likely most other products) that claim to produce an exact
copy, Copy Commander actually creates a bootable backup. I periodically copy
the entire drive to a second hard drive. If the main drive fails, all I have
to do is stick in a jumper and swap cables, then restart. As this isn't
something I do every day, Really Important files are also backed up to a Zip
disk.

My next computer will have integral RAID, and I won't have to manually back
up again, ever. (Except possibly Really Important stuff, just to be safe.)

If you're going for raid, buy a raid controller card, and look at the performance (tom's hardware etc) of each. There is a vast difference in performance between them, and onboard controllers really suck. In fact all the ones I've used don't show much speed increase over a single drive!

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