Re: Looking for backup program with specific characteristics

Tech-Archive recommends: Speed Up your PC by fixing your registry

Saudade wrote:
"Kerry Brown" <kerry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx*a*m> wrote in message
news:%23mBiFq8nGHA.4352@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
You still haven't told us why you need
this only what you believe is the route to accomplish something. If
we knew why you want to accomplish this someone may have an
alternate route for you. I'm talking about a reason like: I have
2,000 people writing to a database and I need to be able to recover
immediately in case of file corruption or hardware failure.

Woa. This is a personal, not a business situation. I'm writing a
very long, very complex non-fiction book with many chapters. I also
keep extensive music databases (about 130 gig total) and photo
databases. I back up on two separate hard drives, one connected to
my computer, one connected to my wife's computer (we're on a home
network). I simply can't afford to lose anything I've written,
period. Thus, I save frequently, and back up manually three times a day.
I also make
very frequent changes to all the databases--deletions and
additions--and the book files also change continually because they
include photographs and other assorted items that I delete and add to
all the time. This is all wildly unmanageable.

That's the task--what should I be doing?


Without spending a lot of money your current methods sound appropriate. You
may want to take another look at Malke's suggestion of Second Copy and add
it to your arsenal. Another option would Microsoft's SyncToy

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/synctoy.mspx

The problem as I see it is procedural and probably won't be solved by
software or hardware alone. You could investigate disk mirroring as a
partial solution. You may want to look at removable hard drives. These are
regular hard drives in a removable tray.

http://www.kingwin.com/pdut_Cat.asp?CateID=25

I have a customer with similar needs to your's. He uses three removable hard
drives as well as an internal drive. Each morning he inserts a different
removable drive and clones the internal drive to it (www.acronis.com) then
removes it. He then inserts another drive that is used as a second drive for
daily use. When saving files he saves twice. Once to the internal drive and
once to the removable drive. He has two days worth of cloned disks on
removable drives and two drives (one internal and one removable) with copies
of all that day's work. A scheme like this combined with using Second Copy
or SyncToy to synchronise files a few times a day with folders on your
wife's computer may work for you.

--
Kerry
MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User


.

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