Jon Hildrum's Backup Thoughts

Did Your hard drive ever fail?? Did you loose all the data you had acquired over a long period of time? Did you make an error and format the wrong drive?? These experiences can be somewhat traumatic but if you had a backup they become nuisances.

The Win95 operating system needs backup. In the old days with DOS backup was for data files and stuff you generated. The operating system could easily be fixed by most and did not take long to reconfigure and fix. Today with Win95, installing and removing programs and application you want to try, leaves remnants all over. It appears as if uninstall and remove never removes everything and furthermore it appears as if the registry is not always cleaned up.

The result is that as time goes on you end up with less and less available disk space, the computer seems to take longer to boot and the performance suffers. Time for a reinstall !!!! Sometimes the system just crashes and it might take quite awhile troubleshooting trying to find the problem(S) and often in the end the solution becomes a reinstall.

A backup is the easy solution just for rejuvenating the system. Of course, a hard disk crash might result in loss of month of data and there maybe no recovery unless you have a backup.  Thus there are two very good reasons for backing up

• Keep your data safe and recoverable

• Fix your system. Ever tried to reinstall and can't find those updates or drivers.

The backup strategy has to be based on individual needs and what is important.

Backup Type Approaches:

Tape:

This is the oldest and probably still the best way. Tapes can hold a lot of data and is easily stored and transported. There are several makers of tape backup hardware and most of it comes with backup software. The choice of the type of device is important and has to fit your needs;

• Parallel    This is the slowest of the backups and works off the parallel printer port. However, since it is external it provides the ability to use the tape drive on more than one machine.

• Floppy    These connect to the floppy drive connector and are internal. They are also slow and can gain significantly from the use of a floppy accelerator card. Some comes with the  card. When using the accelerator card do not use it for anything except the tape backup.   Leave the existing floppies were they are.

• EIDE      Faster than above and normally used for the larger drives. These connects to the IDE interface but remember you are limited to four devices altogether.

• SCSI       This is the fastest way to back up and restore. It is also the most expensive approach unless you already have SCSI devices and a SCSI card installed. This is the most common type approach for larger drives and systems.

• Zip drives    The backup to drives is generally much faster than the backup to Tapes. The question here is how much are you backing up and what do you want. These drives can be used for several other purposes in addition to backup. However, as a backup solution they end up being more expensive than a tape.

• Jaz Drives

• EZ drives

• Back Up to File    A most interesting approach and maybe an excellent solution for some. Use another hard drive and back up to it. It is fast - very fast. 

• Make A drive Image on another Hard Drive. Partionmagic provides an application that lets you do this. Takes less space than a file. Actually, I tried it and it took less than 20 minutes to back up 2G and about the same time to restore (No compression). Max compression took 6 times as long to back up.

The real key to back up is not backing up but how easy it is to restore. The backup software handles this. The issue are often how easy is partial restore and how well does it do full restore. Some software generates a boot disk meaning you can restore after booting from the disk. Means you don't have to restore the operating system first. However, if doing a full restore, the restore is much faster using WIN95 protected mode than it would be from real mode thus the 30-60 minutes spent installing and then restoring might save you quite a bit of time if doing a full restore.

Backup all Valuable information stored on your computer and preferably your system too. It is much better to be safe than sorry. However, since backup is something I hope you never need or I will never need, maybe the solution is to use a media that have other utilities than just backup. The choice is yours. Hers is a list of some providers of backup solutions and software.

Some Backup Hardware and Software Web sites

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Last revised: June 07, 1999.