williamvw, thanks for the article! Very interesting to see how it's done.
I've dealt with a lot of small businesses in recent years. Never ceases to
amaze me how few of them have any kind of data backup strategy. Most of
the setups I deal with are industrial control systems (ie. UNIX systems
used to drive knitting machines, medical scanners, etc.) and thus
typically use SCSI. I tend to get called when things have already begun to
go wrong; once repaired (which typically involves replacing old 1GB to 9GB
50pin SCSI with 36GB 15K SCSI), I've strongly encouraged such companies to
at the very least have a 2nd drive which can be used as a backup clone,
copied regularly either manually for automatically via the cron scheduler
(I provide them with some custom cloning scripts & commands).
Two weeks ago one such company, a small high-street clothing store with a
Stoll knitting machine, called saying they had a problem after trying to
connect a Magneto Optical drive to the system; the MO drive was faulty,
but it messed something else up. Checking it out, I concluded the
configuration files had been corrupted. Thankfully, because of the 2nd
drive I'd installed a year ago, they had a clone backup, though they
guiltily admitted it hadn't been refreshed since April this year. However,
it was sufficient, since only the user data tends to change on such
systems. I transferred the user data across to the clone, made that the
new OS drive, then redid the clone so there was a fresh backup. They were
up & running again within a few hours. Without the backup, a fresh install
would have been required (that would have delayed their work by several
days, which would mean lost sales).
All too often it seems, companies don't realise how important backups are
until something bad happens. A few have a backup device of some kind for
general data, typically an old DAT or MO unit, but virtually none have
thought of the consequences of their main system drive dying; I encourage
them to continue backing up their user data by whatever means they deem
fit (modernising if possible), but setting them up with a system drive
backup clone has saved the day soooo many times. 8)
For consumers, I expect few ordinary users would even think about the
notion of their storage device going wrong, especially if they're not that
tech-savvy. They may not understand how their data is stored, given the
way newer devices are used in a more "black-box" manner than traditional
PCs. I help hobbyists out a fair bit, so I at least make sure they think
about these issues; and if I sell a system, I always include an extra free
disk that's a clone backup of the system disk, just in case.
Ian.
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