RE: Websphere Development Tools

That's fixing the symptom, not the disease.  I suppose having a central
repository of "mirror image" hard drives - one for every PC in the office -
and backing them up on a nightly basis would indeed be a way of preventing
the pain of a crash.  I suspect it could get very expensive and very time
consuming as you got past just a few PCs, however.  40GB drives may be
cheap, but they're not free, nor is the bandwidth required to duplicate,
say, 4TB of data every night (for 100 PCs).

In any event, it's now whether I CAN get around the problem... it's the
galling fact that I have to at all.  Professional software means backing up
your data as needed.  Having to back up my entire system - data, programs
and operating system - every night is not reasonable.

On the other hand, I've learned to live with the "what is" rather than the
"what should be", and you've brought up a great point. I'm going to take it
to heart - it's especially easy since I don't use that much storage, maybe
80GB total (used, not capacity) in my network.  This weekend, if I have
time, I'll see about getting redundant drives and attaching them to my Linux
machine for image backups.

I'm just not sure about the bootable CD bit.  Perhaps you could enlighten me
as to how that works?

Joe


> From: David Morris
>
> Doesn't running software "professionally" include backups?
> This is not a great solution, but I use a utility called ghost
> at work (at home I use a tape backup). I backup and send
> the image to another PC (40 Gig hard drives are cheap)
> before any major install. It takes about 1/2 hour to run a full
> backup of my system, after spending about 5 minutes to
> start it. If I do this during lunch there is very little lost time. If
>
> I have a problem, I then burn a bootable CD with the image
> and reload, which takes about 1 an hour. I have only had to
> do this twice, but in those cases I am sure it saved 10 times
> over reloading the system from scratch.