Rich's RamblingsOk, I give up. How many of these columns have I written to you all to brow-beat you to BACKUP-BACKUP-BACKUP?.by Rich Schinnell
I still receive help line phone calls from members who are very sheepish when I ask them if they have backed up their critical data. It is almost like the computer hard disk is invincible or has a half life of a thousand years. A rule of thumb: If you would cringe or cry over losing data on your hard disk, then you must back it up.
Most of the checkbook or financial management programs either have a menu option to backup your data or they constantly remind you that you have not backed up. Do it. Tape drives are pretty easy to install and getting cheaper all the time. One method might be for you to purchase a spare hard disk. With the price of hard disks getting almost to the ridiculous stage, you might think about picking up a spare 1Gigabyte hard disk. Attach it to your system and on a periodic basis, xcopy your whole C drive to it. If you have a single hard disk and it is partitioned into C,D and others then copying the data to the D drive which is a partition on the same hard disk is not the same thing. I mean a separate physical hard disk. The chances of two physical hard disks going bad at the same time is pretty slim.
Again I will show the steps needed to backup using the XCOPY.EXE program that comes as part of MS-DOS version 6, MS-DOS 7.0 (which comes with Windows95) has some additional commands that I will note the differences.
XCOPY source [destination] [/A | /M] [/D:date] [/P] [/S] [/E] [/V] [/W]
source Specifies the file(s) to copy.destination Specifies the location and/or name of new files. 6/7 /A Copies files with the archive attribute set, doesn't change
the attribute.6/7 /M Copies files with the archive attribute set, turns off
the archive attribute.6/7 /D:date Copies files changed on or after the specified date. 6/7 /P Prompts you before creating each destination file. 6/7 /S Copies directories and subdirectories except empty ones.
6/7 /E Copies any subdirectories, even if empty.
6 /V Verifies each new file.
6/7 /W Prompts you to press a key before copying.
6/7 /Y Suppresses prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an
existing destination file.
6/7 /-Y Causes prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an
existing destination file.
Windows95 Version 7 of MS-DOS's XCOPY program, which is really a
32bit bersion called XCOPY32.EXE has some additional switches,
/C /I /Q /F /L /H /R /T /U /N
/C Continues copying even if errors occur.
/I If destination does not exist and copying more than one file, assumes that destination must be a directory.
/Q Does not display file names while copying.
/F Displays full source and destination file names while copying.
/L Displays files that would be copied.
/H Copies hidden and system files also.
/R Overwrites read-only files.
/T Creates directory structure, but does not copy files. Does not include empty directories or subdirectories. /T /E includes empty directories and subdirectories.
/U Updates the files that already exist in destination.
/K Copies attributes. Normal Xcopy will reset read-only attributes.
/Y Overwrites existing files without prompting.
/-Y Prompts you before overwriting existing files.
/N Copy using the generated short names.
So you see, life is going to get a bit more complicated but, we are going to be able to do backups much easier using the XCOPY command.
XCOPY C:\ D: /S (assuming that you have 2 separate hard disks,
one C and one D), will copy from the C drive to the D drive and
make almost a mirror image of your hard disk #1 onto your spare
hard disk. If you have a large C drive that is partitioned into
more than one drive it is also easy to do.
Remember to partition your new hard disk as extended partitions only, not primary DOS partition and your "backup" hard disk #2 will append the drive letters to the end of your existing drive letters. Of course it will move you CD-ROM drive letters to the end of the chain.
Take for example, you picked up a 2Gigabyte hard disk at a computer show for the $400 they now cost and you were smart and partitioned it at (4) 500Megabyte partitions. Now you have a Primary drive C of 500, a D,E and F drives of 500 megabytes each. Pick up another 2 Gigabyte and then you can partition it the same way except, do not create a primary DOS partition. Only create an extended DOS partition and make each drive 500 megabytes in size. Now you will have something like the following.
Hard disk
#1 #2
C G
D H
E I
F J
If you had a batch file for DOS 6.+
XCOPY C:\ G: /M /S
XCOPY D:\ H: /M /S
XCOPY E:\ I: /M /S
XCOPY F:\ J: /M /S
The /M option only copies the files that do not have their
ARCHIVE bit in the Directory turned on so the First time you
want to run this batch file you will need to make sure that each
of the files on your hard disks have the archive bit turned on.
Do this by typing
ATTRIB +A . /s for each of your hard disks.
VERY IMPORTANT!
The first time you run the batch file, ALL the files will be copied to their corresponding backup hard disk. From then on only the files that were changed, added or modified since the last time the batch file was run will be copied to it's corresponding backup hard disk drive. Deleting files form your regular drives will not delete them from your backup so you should watch out for this "Gotcha". Go to the backup drive and delete them if you wish.
With Windows95 and it's DOS 7,0 XCOPY command, you can use the /K, /H and /R options to make sure that you copy all of the files, even hidden and keep the file attributes.
Windows95 allows the use of Long file names so the XCOPY in MS-DOS 7.0 will copy these over for you. Very important for many installation programs that actually use the Long File Names.
Your mileage may vary.
Back from Chicago and the Spring COMDEX (COMputer Dealers Exposition) and the Association of Personal Computer User Group meetings I will try to give you a flavor of COMDEX . WWW and Internet were the watchword. It seems that everyone had a WEB page creator or gimmick to hang onto your existing word processor to help you create a great looking WEB page.
If you don't know what HTML stands for then that's the next acronym that will become a part of your Internet vocabulary. Hyper Text Markup Language is the programming code for the World Wide Web browsers to interprete and end up on your screen formatted to look pretty.
The WWW and web pages in general are beginning to remind me of a column that I wrote quite a long time ago when the Macintosh was first introduced. I was given a sneak preview by an old friend, (Andrew Fleugelman who was the editor of PC-Magazine.) I was playing with the word processing capabilities of the MAC and thought that all the capabilities were neat but I had a hunch that many users would spend more time putting all the different graphic symbols and changing the fonts so often on one page that any document would end up looking like a ransom note. Sure enough, I was right. Some of the web pages that are on the net are very similar to ransom notes. Gaudy and it takes 4-5 minutes to download all the graphics they include.
There is only so much information that you can include on a
single screen of information and some WWW sites try to cram much
to much into the first page. There are some very creative and
informative sites on the WWW. I constantly surf the web looking
for technical sites on Windows95 and other neat things. Last
month I wrote about a couple of the Windows95 sites that I visit
all the time. http://www.windows95.com
and
http://www.shareware.com are a couple
that come to mind.
Rich Schinnell is the past president of Capital PC and the present Program director. He assists the office staff in keeping busy. He does some limited consulting and enjoys being on the Help line. It is like practicing brain surgery by telephone. By the time you read this he will be on vacation in Europe without his computer. Two weeks of withdrawal hopefully will not be too rough on him.<G> When he is not galavanting around the world, he can be reached via E-Mail at schinnel@cpcug.org or on the phone at (301) 949-9292.
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