[Leica] Question Re Backing Up to External Hard Drives

[shino at panix.com (Rei Shinozuka)]

my wife calls me a hopeless pessimist, i say "i was trained 
as an engineer"

i don't feel safe about my backups unless i physically
replace my primary physical drive(s) with fresh blank ones 
and restore from the backups to create a "clone" of the
original system.  the original disks then become the backup.

needless to say, it's not your daily backup procedure.
it is arduous and disruptive and i've only 
done it a few times.  but by making you deal with your backup
immediately, you'll see problems and missing data right away.
furthermore, you will have gone through a "fire drill" and
you will know how to rebuild your system if your boot drives 
fail.

i do think you ought to periodically try to restore (if not
to a different disk, to a new area in your directory 
structure) 

incidentally, i've worked for 3 broker-deals in 15 years,
where there are numerous regulations and internal requirements 
for digital document retention.  my experience in requesting
restores from IT is something like a 50% success rate.

a successful backup/restore policy is not trivial.

-rei

On May24 11:44, Robert D. Baron wrote:
> Brian Reid observed:
> 
> >I use Retrospect; I depend on it, and have used it for years.
> >But I absolutely do not recommend it to beginners. It is an obscure and 
> >complex program, and adopting it might lead you to doing fewer backups. 
> >Trying to learn how to use it might result in you hitting your own head 
> >with a hammer.
> 
> I could sign an Affidavit confirming this.
> 
> Last fall a hard drive started to fail.  I called my IT Professional 
> over and told him I had installed Retrospect and had been backing up to 
> an external drive.  He checked the external drive and told me I had done 
> it wrong and he couldn't recover the backups.  Fortunately he was able 
> to somehow coax the data off the failing hard drive before it completely 
> gave up the ghost.
> 
> I have been told this is a fairly common occurrence: people think they 
> are making usable backups when in fact they are not.
> 
> I will look at the Retrospect Express packaged with the MyBook but I 
> will also look at Data Backup from Prosoft and possibly other suggested 
> programs.
> 
> I appreciate all the help.
> 
> --Bob
> 
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-- 
Rei Shinozuka shino@panix.com
Ridgewood, New Jersey