[G4] Backup Strategies

[Mel]

Anne,
I am a firm believer in Retrospect. Retrospect backups have saved me on 
a couple of occasions from hard drive failure. You can get a much 
better deal on the backup setup, though. The Maxtor unit has a button 
you press that launches the backup automatically, but Retrospect will 
do scripted backups at a certain time each day or week, so that is not 
really necessary. I have seen pre-assembled 60GB Firewire drives for 
$169 and Retrospect Express sells for $50 and Retrospect Desktop for 
$139 if you need more flexibility or network backups. Retrospect will 
do incremental backups for you so that you don't have to back up the 
whole drive every time. An external drive is good for full backups and 
will provide faster restores in the event of failure, but CD-R will be 
more reliable for long-term archival. Neither the hard drive nor the 
CD-Rs would be bootable from an Retrospect backup, but they would 
restore a working system. CC Cloner will duplicate a bootable system, 
but I think you have to copy the whole disk every time, which is a very 
tedious backup strategy. I do a full system backup to DVD every month 
or so and do nightly incremental CD-R backup for email, Quicken and 
essential documents. That way I can restore the system from DVD and 
then restore the things that change from CD-R. You could do the same 
thing with a hard disk and CDs. Based on your description, Retrospect 
would work pretty well for you.
Zip disks will be much less reliable than either hard drives or CDs. I 
wouldn't trust anything really important to storage on Zip disks.
Mel

On Tuesday, April 1, 2003, at 03:02 PM, Anne Keller-Smith wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm ready to buy an external hard drive and note that Maxtor
> has Dantz Retrospect included, but it's a $399 drive! I was
> planning to spend in the neighborhood of $150-175 for around
> 40-60GB of space.
>
> Is Dantz Retrospect worth the extra money?
>
> Why wouldn't I use Carbon Copy Cloner for same?
>
> Does it make sense to have something that will only backup
> changed files, or backup the whole drive each time it is
> scheduled to back up.
>
> I am doing fairly well just backing up end-of-day stuff on
> zip disks and then doing an end-of-job or end-of-month
> backup burn to CD. My problem is the thought process
> in terms of "what has changed since last backup?" takes
> some time I'd rather devote to other tasks.
>
> Plus, if my main hard drive fails, an external would be
> priceless. I have all burned to CD, but bootable I am sure
> I am not, so the process in case of hard drive crash would
> be a bit cumbersome.
>
> Plus, if my main hard drive fails, an external would be
> priceless. I have all burned to CD, but bootable I am sure
> I am not, so the process in case of hard drive crash would
> be a bit cumbersome.
>
> Anne Keller Smith, Webdesign
> mailto:earthpigz at earthlink.net     http://www.earthpigz.com
> Please no attachments! Thanks.
>
>
>
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