From: ioerger@sophocles.cs.uiuc.edu (Thomas Ioerger)
Subject: logic of backup?
Organization: University of Illinois, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Urbana, IL
Lines: 25

I have been backing up my hard drive ever since I had to re-install
everything from scratch after a crash (learned the hard way, didn't I?!).
I am using a windows-based backup program (actually Norton), and I 
began wondering about the logic of this.  Sure, if I accidentally delete
a file, I can get it from the archive.  But what if my disk crashes again?
I would not be able to start windows to run the backup program!  (Note,
by crash, I mean, there was some error message that prevented the machine
from booting properly.  I think I gave up too early, but I didn't have
the time/patience/tools to figure out exactly what the problem was.  My
hard drive needed cleaning up anyway. Yeah right...)  This whole scenario
is complicated by the fact that I am using Stacker.

So I think there are 2 possibilities:

   1) I'm right.  If my disk really crashes, I would at least have to
      re-install DOS and Windows to get the backup program working.
   2) I'm wrong.  There is an easy way to make a "mirror" of a hard disk
      that can easily restore it's state from scratch.

The polls are open...

Tom Ioerger
Univeristy of Illinois, CS grad student
ioerger@cs.uiuc.edu

