Re: OT: Query on mirroring for Paul Breeze et al.

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Patricia M Godfrey wrote:

> I have several antique drives lying around that
> still run perfectly. Slowly but perfectly. Some of them have been in
> machines that suffered shorts in the controller card, power failures, and
> other dire events, but the drive still functions. And two weeks ago the
> bookkeeper's PC died--with, we thought, no backups. (She thought I was
> backing up, I thought she was; fortunately, the CFO was doing it, but she
> was away, so we didn't know that.) But when I popped the drive into the
> replacement machine, there were all the data, Laus Deo.

Patricia,

I think one needs to adopt the mindset that a boot-drive disaster is going to
not be a matter of IF, but of WHEN. Then, the question becomes: Will you be
prepared, whenever it does occur ? I have always used the more expensive
SCSI drives -- the kind that used to have 5 year warranties, because they
were much more durable. These tended to be purchased by enterprise
situations, rather than by your typical end-users. And I've recently had
some scary indications of failure, that I can't yet pin decisively on the
drives, or the cables, or the connectors, or general cooling levels inside
the box, any or all of which could be implicated. The bottom line is that I
really need to clone those drives, SOON -- something I should have done a
year ago, but kept putting off. The more important what's on the drive is to
you, the more important this becomes. For a business, I'd suggest *at least*
one clone of each drive, *plus* regular updates with partition imaging. Data
backups go without saying, and are generally less of a problem. But I'm
talking about being able to rapidly restore your OS and installed app.s as
well. Absent that, you are faced with a horrendous, frustrating, and
time-consuming task. Not to mention being out of commission for awhile.

> CyberGuys has a gizmo that let's one have two hard drives in a PC,
> internally, and switch between them by flipping an external switch on the
> front of the box (rather like the old printer switch boxes). Each is
> invisible to the other. That sounds like a good expedient for dual
> booting, but probably not as useful for backup and restore.

I think you surmise correctly.

> How do hardware companies create those maddening "restore CDs"?

You mean, like for the ThinkPads ? I'm not sure. Anyway, it's not something
most end users could make on their own.

> If we poor end
> users could do that, doing it every time we installed some new hardware
> or software, or just messed around with control panel (and, of course,
> kept our data on a separate partition), things would be MUCH simpler.

What I would still like to see is something that could *very quickly and
easily* take you from a blank, fresh install of Windoze (since that seems to
be the inescapable OS for most folks -- though I leave the particular version
up in the air), to one that has all the **many** fixes and security updates
on it, plus all the app.s you've installed over time and all the shortcuts,
preferences, and settings for your desktop and all the app.s. In theory, a
good, recent boot-partition image should be able to do an end-run around all
that. (I have tripped over a few slippery banana peels that can prevent this
from working, however.) Some IT departments seem to have access to CD's (or
something else) that can restore the base OS plus all updates -- up to a date
certain -- in one shot. But that leaves out all the app.s and all the
customization. There is a migration program called Aloha Bob's PC Relocator,
that is supposed to cover most or all of the above. There is also an
inexpensive suite of utilities from Germany -- ProfileCopy, part of the "12
Ghosts" set -- that apparently does at least some of this. I would like to
find the rapid, all-encompassing solution, whatever it may be, because I have
already experienced a few dead and unrecoverable Windoze installations, and
balked at the thought of recreating them from scratch. Then again, if SVISTA
(an alternative to the Connectix Virtual PC that got eaten by Redmond) is a
rip-roaring success, maybe I'll be able to dump *real* Windoze altogether.
This won't change the need for an effective disaster plan, though.

Jordan