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MathsIsFun

Administrator

Registered: 2005-01-21

Posts: 7,713

Backing Up Your Disk

My current backup "strategy" (for my home PC) is to occasionally copy data files to a safe location.

But if my hard disk died it would be days of pain reinstalling, followed by months of "I used to have this set up just right", and I would be sure to lose some valuable data too.

So, I have this bright idea ... buy a new Hard Disk (they are not that expensive nowadays) and "mirror" onto it (have it as a copy of my current hard disk).

But how? There is "RAID", but that is complicated to set up, and what happens if the RAID card dies?

Another possibility is to create a full duplicate (programs like Norton Ghost can do that), this takes many hours (which is fine), but how do you then keep it up-to-date? Say you install some new software, or upgrade something, there will be changes all over the place, files, registry, etc.

It would be nice if you could just run some software that copied ALL changes, say every midnight.

If that could be done, then if your disk fails, you just swap to the other disk and carry on! Likewise if you get a virus or accidentally delete a file, you can access the midnight backup.

Ideas?

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"The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God ..."  - Leon M. Lederman

Devantè

Real Member

Registered: 2006-07-14

Posts: 6,400

Re: Backing Up Your Disk

Nice idea, people would be able to lead a great PC lifestyle.

I can't see many flaws in it, but then people might have to refrain from making a high amount changes in the registry (and) system. It sounds kind of silly (what I am saying), but I think a back-up should occur a lot more than that. Or, perhaps, once every 48 hours, maybe. Yeah, at midnight, that'll work.

John E. Franklin

Member

Registered: 2005-08-29

Posts: 3,588

Re: Backing Up Your Disk

Last edited by John E. Franklin (2007-03-03 04:06:10)

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igloo myrtilles fourmis

Patrick

Real Member

Registered: 2006-02-24

Posts: 1,005

Re: Backing Up Your Disk

\textsc{\\
Very interesting future idea.\\
Currently, I burn a CD of things I am working on.\\
It's only a small percentage of everything I have on\\
the system, never mind all the free downloaded software,\\
but also I make a copy of the desktop folder so if it gets\\
messed up by an inexperienced user, I can get things\\
back easier.\\
}

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Ricky

Moderator

Registered: 2005-12-04

Posts: 3,791

Re: Backing Up Your Disk

Great idea.  Too bad it's already been taken a run with though.  The software is called Norton Ghost.  I used to use it when I worked with desk side support for a company.  We would have one "image" of a fully set up computer, then we could just use Norton Ghost to copy over everything to a new computer for a new employee.  Also very useful when you want to give someone a new computer.  Just take an image of their old one, put it onto a new machine.

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"In the real world, this would be a problem.  But in mathematics, we can just define a place where this problem doesn't exist.  So we'll go ahead and do that now..."

MathsIsFun

Administrator

Registered: 2005-01-21

Posts: 7,713

Re: Backing Up Your Disk

But the problem is keeping the image up-to-date.

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"The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God ..."  - Leon M. Lederman

Ricky

Moderator

Registered: 2005-12-04

Posts: 3,791

Re: Backing Up Your Disk

I don't think there is any easy way.  That is, unless the program (i.e. Ghost) is setup to run off a script specifically for this purpose.

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"In the real world, this would be a problem.  But in mathematics, we can just define a place where this problem doesn't exist.  So we'll go ahead and do that now..."