[OT-ish] HDD formatting "good practice"

[John Cartmell]

That's always been the feature of RISC OS machines with the OS in ROM.

[Mark]

An even better solution is to more than one HD.

I've found a lot of DAT drives to be very unreliable.

Mark

[Mark]

Agreed. Sometimes it works often not. The problem with windows networking is it's all a big kludge. If they stop trying to maintain backwards compatibility it might be better.

What are you using (Samba)?

Mark

[Mike Barnes]

Are you suggesting five? That's what I'd need in order to avoid partitioning.

I'm on my third DAT drive (no problems, just two voluntary upgrades for increased capacity) and I've not had any problems. What would you recommend instead?

[manatbandq]

Xilinx is a company, I doubt it's employees would take kindly to being squeezed onto a hard disk.

MBQ

[b33k34]

My 2 1/2 year old pc has a 250gb drive and i created 3 partitions. Personally i still think it makes sense to seperate the os and apps from data but Windows will fight your attempts to do it.

Having data on a seperate drive makes back ups easier and means it is possible to create an image of your OS and apps for reinstallation if necessary. Saying that i've not made a backup image for ages.

The third partition was for video recorded off the DTT card - i wanted to keep that seperate so that i didn't run out of useful space and get to the point where the PC wouldnt function.

If you get partition sizes wrong you can always use partition magic to mess with them later.

[Tim S]

True - but it would be fun to try :) Serve them right for producing such lumpy software ;->

Tim

[John Rumm]

Don't you just love the way the word Xilinx can make an engineer go "arrrgggggghhh".... such marketing promise, and such pain in reality most of the time! ;-)

[Tim S]

Heh. Never mind you engineers, at least you think you want their product ;->

It's us systems folk who cry like virgins faced with the tentacle-monster that this beast is.

Cheers

Tim

[dennis]

You are mistaken. It does happen. I have had it happen to one of my backups.

As long as the data is of low value its fine.

[Mike Barnes]

Interesting.

My comment was in response to yours:

"Murphy says that the software will crash during the backup and that both the original and the backup will be lost if you only have one."

What software *was* that, AAMOI?

[Owain]

And, of course, if the data is corrupted (or infected) but there isn't a system crash, it might not be noticed for months but have been incorporated into the backups.

For domestic use, periodic incremental backups over broadband should be feasible, in fact some sites offer this commercially.

Owain

[Huge]

Anything produced by Microsoft.

[John Rumm]

If you backup to DVD-R (not RW) then there is no temptation to overwrite old backups. And a pennies a disk it hardly costs anything either.

[Mark]

No? I am suggesting using more than one disk and not bother partitioning them. However, if you really want to, I won't stop you ;-)

Unfortunately I've never found a backup solution I am 100% happy with. If you have had success with DAT drives then stick with them - maybe I've just been unlucky.

Mark.

[dennis]

It was unix and a tar archive. I never did find out what happened as it was unattended at the time.