Welcome to the March 2003 issue of the CyberArtisans monthly newsletter!

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Disaster Protection

Your computer runs just fine, just an occasional glitch that you can clear with a few minutes frustration. But are you ready for the day you start your system and it says it can't find your disk drive? Experienced computer techs will tell you that there are only two types of disk drives: Those that have crashed and those that haven't crashed ... yet. When a disk crashes you may or may not be able to recover its contents. And if it is possible, it often costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars for the services of a disk-recovery company.

Of course if you had burned your data onto a CD within the last few days, you would be able to recover virtually everything on your disk with a minimum of hassle. Here's how we set things up for data backup:

Some people back up their entire system, including the operating system. We feel that if we are going to rebuild the disk, we'd rather start with a new install of the OS rather than a copy of the current version with all its history and its problems. And having done it more than a few times, we don't find the process of reinstalling the OS and software that onerous, as long as we have all the code and activation keys. Naturally, we have all our CDs, but some of our software is downloaded. That software we keep in a separate folder on our disk, along with the current keys for each, and we back that up onto its own CD.

• C-drive - Our C-drive contains the OS and OS-related software like firewalls.
• D-drive - Our D-drive is where we install all user software.
• E-drive - All user data is on our E-drive, including e-mail. Before backing up this drive, we copy our e-mail Address List from its location on the C-drive to here.
• F-drive - The F-drive is where we put compressed data (see below) before burning it to a disk.
  

We use PowerQuest (http://www.powerquest.com) DriveImage to make a compressed copy of our E-drive. DriveImage includes a drive image file editor, which allows you to recover individual files or folders from a drive image file rather than the whole drive (although that's an option, too, of course).

Other Ways

There are other ways to do it, of course. Now that disk drives are so cheap, some people simply install a second disk drive of the same size and regularly copy the main drive to the backup drive. This is convenient and reliable since the probability of both drives failing simultaneously is very small, and disk-to-disk transfers are very fast. Nonetheless, the belt-and-suspenders approach here would dictate at least an occasional (once a month) backing up of the user data to a CD.

If you don't have a lot of data, ZIP drives are good, fast, and reliable.

And there is also tape backup, which is slow but easily automated to run at night.

Concerns

And depending on how long you need to keep your data, there is always the question of how long a particular technology will last (anybody have an 8" diskette drive?). No method is foolproof, of course, so pick the one that fits your needs the best.

Diskettes

One last thought: Don't use diskettes for backup. In fact, we'd be sorely tempted to say don't use diskettes for anything. They are the most unreliable data storage medium available to current computer users. And they are probably on their way out as a storage medium -- Dell has recently stopped offering diskette drives as standard equipment on their new systems.

Techie's Links

Thanks for joining us this month. See you next month.

Jonathan Spencer
CyberArtisans Web Developers

http://www.cyberartisans.com/
617-965-4110