Saving Mail and Other Program Data

[Charles Martin]

> From: Anne Keller-Smith <earthpigz at earthlink.net>
>
> I am using a Maxtor external drive but Dantz Retrospect takes too long
> to back up the entire hard drive every couple days.
> 2-3 hours.
>
> Therefore, while I back up documents quite frequently, I do an entire
> hard drive backup only every other month or after a new
> program install, etc.
>
> I do need to back up mail with the same frequency as the other
> documents.
>
I believe (someone more familiar with Retrospect will hopefully 
supplement me here) that there's a setting in Retrospect that allows 
you to do backups that ONLY backup the modified/new files (ie prefs, 
data, etc) after the initial full backup, which should save you hours 
of time. Check the help guide for more info on this.

How often you need to backup your mail depends entirely on you. How bad 
would it be if your drive went "poof" right now (heaven forbid) and 
it's been (let's say) two days since your last backup?

An alternative idea is to dump Retrospect and use Carbon Copy Cloner 
(or something like it, I recently heard about a GUI for rsync that I 
haven't investigated yet), which can be set to do the kind of backup I 
describe above after a full "clone." Seems pretty fast to me, and it 
creates a perfect bootable duplicate of my HD every time. It's also 
schedulable so you don't even need to remember to do it.

_Chas_

Have you noticed that this administration's harshest critics are ... 
lifelong Republicans?
Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neil, John McCain, Scott Ritter, Pat Buchanan, 
John Dean, John O'Neill, David Kay ... and the list goes on ...