Re: XY and on-line sessions

[nsivin@xxxxxxxx (Nathan Sivin)]

I use a 420mb hard drive for backing up, and find it very adequate.
It is both cheap and very fast.

The issue is what you want to back up. I see no point in backing up
application programs. I simply do an incremental uncompressed backup
just before shutting down at the end of the day, with the simple
command

xcopy *.* d: /m/s

and the whole thing is finished in 5 seconds. About once a month I
get rid of ephemeral correspondence etc. files. Since I don't do
heavy graphics and multimedia, only about 100mb of the drive is
filled. When I need to restore something I can find it immediately
and put it in place with a simple xcopy.

With all that extra space, I can always temporarily and very quickly
back up a whole directory before installing an update of software,
etc.

--
Nathan Sivin
History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia PA 19104-3325
(nsivin@xxxxxxxx)