I thought I would share the results of some research I did. I needed to make sure the 50 Gigs of data I have accumulated is never lost, and over the years I have gradually moved from on-board drives to external.
Right now I use three external mirrored 80 Gig drives (all exact copies) on the USB bus, and because I work all day I needed to make sure all my info is synchronised at the same time.
I spent hours looking at and testing software packages, and finally settled on Peer Software’s PeerSync, which is configurable by saved profiles (so they can be changed without hours of thought), and will do such tasks as simple backing up as well as on-the-fly replication.
Peer also insists you install a (free) demo first and see if it works for you…
Guess what? A month ago (the software had been installed about two weeks) I heard a loud electrical short and a power spike literally fried my dual-processor motherboard, boot drive and power supply (inside the tower). Because the software had maintained my data up to the minute, I lost nothing but the (entire) desktop. Nothing survived, not even the IC cards.
I had purchased a new computer, had it configured to my specs and was back at work – with all my data – within 12 hours.
Another tip: I always copy all of my software (even Windows install files and applications) to the same hard drive setup, and install everything from there. The installs go much faster, there is no endless disk-swapping and CD jewel fumbling, and you never have to worry about where your CDs are or when they are going to self-destruct (because of the foil deteriorating).
Here’s another: when I travel I simply unhook the first external drive and walk away with my laptop and extra cables. When I get back to my desktop computer I simply put the drive back in the original sequence and run the backup software to match that to the other two, and I’m back to full mirrored storage.
If a dive fails I simply buy a new one, do an Xcopy (with appropriate switches) and I have full triple storage again.
There may be a better way to do all this, but it works for me. When I re-equipped I also bought a new 1,000 watt UPS and was still working 20 minutes after The Big Blackout!!!
