re: XY and on-line sessions

[oport@xxxxxxxx (Otis Port)]

Harry--
>>I'll also put in 32MB of RAM and a 4MB ATI video card that mates to the PCI
>>bus. A fast CD-ROM, a high-speed 1GB SCSI backup . . .

>Recommended: get a second hard-drive for backup. Prices are probably cheaper
>for a 1 gig harddrive than for a 1 gig tape drive. True, you can't remove
>the drive, ...

Ah, but you *can* remove the hard-drive backup. There are several mountings
with removable HD frames that turn any half-height drive into a removable
cartridge. I have four backup drives, two containing duplicates of my data
base and other essentials, while the other two back up work docs and programs.
  The backup drives (1 gig, 850 meg, 500 meg, and 200 meg) were previously
my main drives. And my current 2.6-gigger will become a backup as soon as I
finish installing the 4-gig drive that arrived yesterday.
  A further advantage of this approach is that the backups are really more
like mirrored drives. If the main drive crashes, I just change a backup's
scsi ID to 0, and I'm back in business. IOW, I don't use a backup program;
ascii and binary data is just copied to the removable drive, using an app
that looks at the date/time stamp and overwrites older files.
  Also, I can use the removable drives to transport data between machines
here at home and between home and office PCs -- altho that's done mainly
with 88-meg Syquest cartridges.
  One minor problem is that I have to reboot after changing removable HDs.
A potential fix: the Corel SCSI suite has a "reset" command that appears to
re-identify a particular drive. At least that's how I read the manual. I'll
be installing this on the new drive in hopes of avoiding the need to reboot,
now that my family of backup HDs is becoming fairly large.

  -otis
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