Re: [tlug] Hard Drive Failure (Was: Help! Total hardware failure)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Dave M G writes:

 > My problem up to now has not so much been the frequency of backups, but 
 > the completeness. I'm always creating new documents and folders and data 
 > that I don't remember to include. So really I want a system where every 
 > now and again I can just slam the entire contents of a drive onto 
 > another drive.

If completeness of backups is your issue, RAID does this for you
automatically.  You can get software RAID via the Linux kernel and
some additional utilities, or hardware RAID (actually, firmware-in-a-
box) as Mark mentioned.

I would still recommend following the path Curt suggested, as it
forces one to get some discipline in disk usage.  It really doesn't
take much; you just make sure there's a hierarchy where all your work
data is, and back that thing up.

Another thing to do is to use a version control system.  That doesn't
solve the backup problem per se, but it's a similar discipline and
may help solve related problems.