Backup & Restore

[MaxVal]

I have been contemplating another method of backup. How about a spare hard drive that is occasionaly copied from the main drive, preferably incrementally! If a problem should arise you could change your system BIOS setings to boot from the D: drive, then clone back to C:.
This may be over simplified, but it seems possible in my mind. The part that I don't have down is the actual INCRIMENTAL backup process. Does anyone know what software would work for this?
Comments?

[MaxVal]

Thanks for the response.
It seems to me that the inability to boot from the second hard drive would make this exercise more complicated and bothersum than I would like.
Does the software have to write to a file on an IDE disk?
Can it write in a Fat 32 readable manner to a SCSI hard disk?
Max

[LJE2]

No it will write to a SCSI hard drive or any other SCSI type of backup device (Tape, removable drive, ect.), but it cannot write to FAT 16 or FAT 32, without first formating this partition in a manor that is only readable buy the Backup software.

[sourjon]

MaxVal: If you are not worried about compressing the data the XCOPY command in a batch file with appropriate switches will do the same thing. Incremental or full. I have two identical batches with the exception of the switches. One does incremental and the other does a full. I run the incremental every day and the full every Monday using MS Scheduler. The contents are readable and accessible from DOS for any repairs I have to do. Type XCOPY /? |more at a prompt for an explanation of the switches. Works great.

[BBA]

I got that one on tap too!

I have 2 drives, one SCSI and one IDE. I have Win98 loaded on each of them. I placed only one of them in the system when I installed windows, then the same to the other, with the result that all I have to do to switch is to go into bios and change the boot order from A,C SCSI to A,SCSI,C.

It also will be pretty cool for my next endeaver, I'm gonna load WIN98SE on the IDE tomorow to see how well it works and what's really different, and I'll still have the good'ol regular on tap if I need it.

BBA

[LJE2]

With hard drives so cheap, this has become an option, I believe just about any Backup software will allow you to do what you have suggested. I use Seagate Backup Exec Desktop 98, you can do a full backup or you can just backup the files that have changed or been added, and this software allows you to save a compressed version to a number of different types of devices and drives (Tape, removable hard drives, ect. or save to "File"). If you save to "file" you just have to type the name of the directory, or drive. The only drawback that I see to doing this, if you want to call it a drawback, the software has to format the "media", in this case the drive, the type of format it does to this media is not readable, from DOS or Windows, it is only recognized by the backup software, so the whole 2nd drive or the partition on the 2nd drive you have designated for this format will not be available for storage or use by Windows for anything but these backups. Since this format is not readable by DOS or Windows you could not boot to this drive but the software allows you to boot to a floppy and from this floppy you could do a full restore.

[This message has been edited by LJE2 (edited 06-29-99).]