Re: Off topic: CD-R backup

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

Patricia M Godfrey wrote:

> Yes, well, backing up one's whole system would be lovely, but as far as I
> can see, Windoesn't won't let you. Oh, one can create a compressed
> specialized backup file, but one would have to be running Windows to
> restore it, no? But actually copying C: in toto? You cannot do it from
> within Win, because some of the files are "in use." Booting into DOS, you
> cannot access your CD-R (at least, not in record mode). I thought I might
> have found a workaround with my new, huge, hard drive: boot to DOS, copy
> C: to a directory on F:, then reboot to Windows and copy the F: directory
> to a CD (once I get a CD-R). Halfway through the procedure I get an
> "invalid path" (it was in the middle of the Acrobat Reader folder, and I
> cannot imagine what was invalid--unless the path was so long that it went
> over DOS's path length limit?) and the whole shebang shuts down. Grr.
> Patricia

Patricia,

I've been down this road pretty well by now, in part for an article I wrote
awhile
back. (This situation is noticeably easier and more amenable to solution on
the
OS/2 side, but that isn't going to help you . . . . ) What I know about it
vis-a-vis
the Win-32 side is considerably less, much of it gleaned from conversations
with
a couple of Win consultants and things I've read.

The situation is possibly even worse than you thought. Besides
non-cooperating
locked files, the consultants tell me that there are portions of Win that Win
will not
allow to be backed up. I took this assertion to Tech Support at CDS, makers
of the
Back Again II backup program (primarily designed for tape drives, though it
is
supposed to support other media like CD and DVD), which I've had and upgraded

for some years now, and they claim that their program has ways of getting
around
this, otherwise they wouldn't be in business. This may be academic to you:
the better
tape drives can be expensive, not everyone likes tape, CDs are too
low-capacity for
serious backup use, and the other possible backup devices aren't cheap
either. I have
done successful Restores from tape with the OS/2 version of their program,
though
the occasion has not yet come up where I've attempted this with the Win-32
one, except
for piecemeal blocks of files. Nor have I experimented with their program
for other media.

To the extent that the locked files are a real inconvenience, you can get
around that
whole business by having what is known as a Maintenance Partition -- a
secondary
iteration of your OS. It allows you to work more conveniently
"cross-border," for
trouble-shooting and software servicing, for emergencies, and for Backup /
Restore efforts.
I have one of these for OS/2, and one for W2K.

Unless you put in a 2nd. hard drive (anchored or slide-out), the H/D option
for backups
is limited. I happen to think the best backups are portable, and rotated
off-site. I mean,
these days you normally have the room to carve out additional partitions on
your H/D,
even on the very space-wasteful Win-32 systems, but then what happens if the
whole
H/D goes South ? I've seen that happen (luckily, not yet to me), and it
ain't pretty.
Re-installing the OS, all your app.s, Preferences and Settings, the desktop
etc. -- takes
a good while, and what a pain ! Replacing a hard drive is the least of it.

There are fast, external USB hard drives: ONTRACK had a relatively
inexpensive line
that used to be SCSI but is now USB or firewire based; Maxtor just came out
with a
faster 7200 RPM version of theirs. I have no experience with these, for
backup or
anything else. The consultants say OS-backup won't work with any software
they've tried,
but they seem ignorant of the CDS product. I think it provides a diskette
set (Do you still
have a 1.44 floppy ?) that can boot far enough to get into their Restore
program, or there
must be some other boot options by now, and then you'd just need the drivers
to see
both your external and built-in hard drives.

Another thing I do -- in parallel, because it is an "All or Nothing" type of
deal -- is to
make whole partition images with PowerQuest's Drive Image. I have
successfully restored
from these a few times, though there are a few "Gotchas" to steer clear of,
such as making
sure the partition being imaged has just passed a thorough CHKDSK /F scan,
with a recent
defrag run being highly recommended also. The problem here is what to do
with the images.
Even with the 50 % Compression option, Win-32 partitions are humongous. By
all means,
park a copy on a spare hard drive storage partition (*and*, you need a large
enough blank
space partition just to create the image in the first place), but you also
want to get the image
file off the H/D for added protection. These great big files can be
"chunked" onto CD-R,
but that can be quite a nuisance. DVD-R starts to make a whole lot more
sense, if one has it.
This is a case where the slide-out H/D or external H/D box would make it
easy.

Those are the options, as I'm aware of them. Hope this helps.

Jordan