[The alumni president asked me today if I was planning on attending our bi-annual fun day. I am, so I responded as follows:]
Yes, I am coming [to the fun day this year]. I must have missed how to make the reservations. Do we just have to tell you?
Tom Hesley
Dear [Lynn],
Given what you said, I’d just use the Backup software that comes with Windows. You can configure it to take nightly backups of the computer’s hard drives and saving them to the external drive. Then, let’s say that your system drive crashes. This is the drive that has the operating system on it. In that case, you can replace the failed drive with a new one, insert the XP CD ROM and boot from it into the Windows recovery console. From there, you can give commands to populate the new hard drive from the backup on the external drive. Once the restoration is complete, you then boot from the new hard drive this time, and the system should come up looking the same as it did before the crash — all programs and settings applied. This saves you from having to reinstall programs after a crash.
Now if you’re looking to set up the system so that it keeps running after a crash without having to restore a backup, you’d have to employ fault-tolerant hard drives. But people don’t usually do that unless they’re running mission-critical applications that serve customers directly (like web sites and such). It’s expensive to maintain these drives and not a trivial task to set them up.
But if all you want to do is back up your data files (and not the computer settings and software), then it’s easy to simple run xcopy periodically to copy your data files from the primary to the external drive. Then if you have a primary failure, once you get the new drive installed and populated, you can again use xcopy, this time to copy the files from the external drive back to the new primary drive. It really just depends on how complicated you want to get. But personally, I’d go with the MS BACKUP solution discussed in the first paragraph above.
Tom
Dear [Emmy],
Will keep you posted on all these things. Yes, writing back and forth helps me too. Any chance to write I get, I try to take because it improves my overall writing skills.
Yes, it’s raining here today.
Don’t you have an umbrella?
Yes, you dressed very nicely this summer.
Well, take care, and talk to you this afternoon.
Tom Hesley
Hey there [Emmy].
Congratulations on taking the bus. You’ll probably find the bus more liberating than paratransit – it’s more on time and reliable, and generally can take less time to get you where you’re going. Good job!
Will let you know about the eye appointment [to correct the floater that recently appeared in my right eye] as soon as I return home from it.
Funny thing about Bob. When I first started talking to [LizDee], he was pestering her as well – sending her nasty emails and leaving angry voice mails. Well, hopefully, he’ll fade away soon.
No problem on listening to your frustrations. Glad I can help, if through nothing more than just listening.
I awoke at 3:30 this morning, and couldn’t get back to sleep until around 5:45. So I didn’t get up for the day until 9:40. Thus, this is why I haven’t written until now.
More later,
Tom