Perhaps some related tales from work and home
The Tale of Thunder:
Early one morning, the receptionist at work, sat down to start work.
She pushed the power button on her PC.
BOOOM! A cloud of smoke started rising from the cubicle beside her.
BOOM! Another cloud from the next one after that.
BOOM! Another one in the third cubicle.
As it was starting to get pretty smoky in the office at that point, she was starting to panic, called the bosses downstairs, and was running around turning everything off that she could.
The electrician had to be called in to redo the wiring in the walls.
Total casualties:
- 3 power supplies
- 1 motherboard
- 0 harddrives.
At home, My power supply quietly started increasing the voltage going out for an unknown reason.
The harddrive was the first to go. Replacements ran way too hot (>45 degrees C) even when idling. Burned out after only a week of use.
In the meantime, my CPU fan died, and would twitch sporadically instead of spin. Likely the same problem.
By the time I discovered what was going on, it was too late, and my motherboard was toast too.
The only original components on my PC now are the outer case, 50% of the RAM, and the CPU.
Yet despite all that, my files are mostly intact.
I had made a disk image of my C
ive back in August, and had all my files on different partitions of the single 40GB disk.
So I had my image, of all places, on the same physical disk as the data it was backing up!
At the moment, I have one 40GB primary drive in my machine, split into the C-Drive (windows) and D-Drive (games/files), and E-Drive (windows CD)
I also invested in an "industrial grade" surge protector and a CD-rewritable drive. Ten bucks for a package of CD-RWs, and I now have a set of 650 Meg "floppies" to use for backing things up on. Works just like the A drive used to when harddrives were 40
Megabytes
What I would like to do is to make a basic install of windows, and load my regular programs, but to the D
ive.
Then take an image of the C-drive to capture the registry, and all the windows files in one swoop.
Should fit on a regular CD or two.
Then I can use my rewritables to back up my SE4 mods and savegames each turn. As well as anything other miscellaneous documents and files.(They're good for thousands of erasings and rewritings.)
With that combination, I will feel safe.
Plus, I can wipe out viruses and system problems by formatting the C-drive, and dropping the Image back on without wrecking anything else.
The only things that I'd need to worry about would be my Favorites/shortcuts and my desktop files.
PS:
Oh, and given two different sized drives, I would use the smaller one for windows and try to leave a lot of free space on it. That will help with fragmentation, swapfile, and speed of access.
[ January 03, 2003, 17:12: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]