"Red Cloud®" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 19 Jul 2005 00:20:13 GMT, "Bill McKee"
wrote:

Most power problems, etc, do not take out the drive, so taking out both is
extremely rare.. But how much info do you really need to backup? I put
my
Excel and .doc and quickbooks data on a CD each month. Most of the stuff,
is rebuildable or not really needed. And how long you going to take to
backup your system? Using a 2nd drive and xcopy and you can boot in
minutes. You running a business, depending on the data, then get a raid
system and large removable drives. And keep them offsite.


Well, Bill, if you don't care about data protection, then I agree that a
second
drive is adequate in your case. It's barely better than no backup at all
for the
majority of things that can go wrong.

Meanwhile, the purpose of data backups is to prevent loss. Almost everyone
has
fire insurance on their homes, yet very few ever need it. Rarity of loss
is not
the criteria, value of the data is the criteria. Power problems taking out
drives or causing data corruption is rare, but IT HAPPENS. That's what
backups
are for. If those things did not happen, no one would need backups at all.

It doesn't matter how long my home backups take, as I am asleep when they
are
being made. I take the DVD to work, figuring that my house and office will
hopefully not both burn down the same day. If they do, then I'm out of
luck!
I've greatly reduced my risk though... A second hard drive barely does
anything
to reduce your risk. It is about the weakest system of backup. Very
convenient,
perhaps, but safety is rarely measured by convenience. Most safety
measures in
any area, come at the cost of some convenience.

At work, our MAN has over 50 servers and all data gets backed up to a
central
backup system every night. Those tapes are picked up by a service and
taken
offsite for safekeeping.

rusty redcloud



"Red Cloud®" wrote in message
. ..
On Mon, 18 Jul 2005 20:05:12 GMT, "Bill McKee"

wrote:

Put a 2nd as big disk in and just back up to it.

"Doug Kanter" wrote in message
...
Full backup once a week, incrementals every night.



That's about the weakest form of "backup" there is. It's almost not even
worth
doing. Most things that cause data loss would cause loss of your backup
drive as
well. Virus? Power surge? Fire? Theft? File corruption? It's not really
a
backup
if it is part of the computer. Backups, to be effective data protection,
need to
be on removable media, and stored offsite.

rusty redcloud



When I was in the business world, I did backups to tapes and stored offsite.
For most home computers, how much have you lost? Your email history? I
understand backups very well as I designed disk subsystems as well as the
disk drives. Search the US PTO and you can even see my name on disk drive
patent.