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Phillyblast
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 02, 2003 - 09:24 am: | 
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Mike-
I've had a great but limited experience with Mac OSX - I'm upgrading my parent's iMac this Xmas  so I'll let you know. for me it's the best of both worlds - crunchy Unix center with a candy shell.
Don and Hans - I just checked - running "ntbackup" on the XP box at work gives me a wizard with a few options, including "advanced" - click it and the old Veritas BackupExec utility pops up, then it promptly crashed explorer.  So like reep said, not sure it's worth using. And you will need a working copy of Windows installed already, then restore over it.
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Mikej
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 02, 2003 - 09:37 am: |
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It sounds like the Microsoft Gates mansion is built upon a Portugese Bend, a mound of moving earth. Instability on a better day, catastrophy on others.
Heh heh, and they are pushing to migrate our department to MS based systems. Let's see, I regularly overtax and crash the Sun Unix box, when Win-whatever is installed I'll probably just go home. |
Josh_
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 02, 2003 - 09:57 am: |
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>Does Ghost provide a synchronization?
I don't know. I have heard they really added a bunch of stuff in the new wer versions.
I do know that Ghost will let you boot off a diskette and restore/image to a USB drive or CDR.
So image from Windows, when it goes to hell boot from a diskette and restore.
You can also recover individual files from the image using Ghost Explorer.
I've got a demo copy if you want to try it.
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M1combat
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 03, 2003 - 01:10 am: |
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I have found that Paragon Drive Backup V5.5 suits my needs very well. I believe their prices were more than fair as I recall. After that, maybe try a 3-Ware IDE RAID controller with four 100GB drives of your choice setup for level 5. The prices for the RAID controllers are fair as well. I've been using 2 for 3 years and not one lost bit. Drive two on one of them loses power every now and then, but immediately begins rebuilding itself. Oh, the same XP install for the two years. The key is to not install ANY software that isn't mission critical. That doesn't work real well for a home PC.
You want a backup system... NTFS 5 support should be nearing final stages in the GNU world so you may as well build a $50 DSL (Damn Small Linux) or ADIOS (Automated Download and Installation of Operating Systems) server with a decent sized disk and just backup over the network. Oh yeah, you could also use this PC as a very capable firewall. My recommendation would be to run the firewall on an outside copy of Redhat which is running a jailed (fake in a sense) copy of slakware inside of it that handles the file sharing and backups. Just to be reasonably sure no one can find it... Of course make sure you have cisco on the outside working it's NAT magic.
In case you hadn't noticed, the Linux box has two nics.
Sorry, I digress...
Norton system works should suit a home based PC or traveling laptop well.
I'm not a fan of McAfee.
If you want backups, Paragon or Ghost. Ghost will let you recover individual files as was mentioned. Paragon is designed more for working with multiple images on more than one machine although ghost can do that as well.
An internet e-mail acct. for standard use and maybe your ISP account for personal use ONLY.
Spybot S&D or Ad-Aware. I have never had any trouble at all with Spybot, Ad-Aware had ads...
On the distro-war subject . I believe redhat to be the best "distro" because it's easy to use, comes with a TON of software, still doesn't have it's hood welded shut, looks nice, has a seemingly effective update system, has ALL the power of any other distro (I mean it's all open source, so just grab the cool stuff you want from everywhere right?), and has a VERY easy to use installer (but just as powerful as any other as well). Among others I'm sure... like that internet based asteroids-like game . Also, I like GRUB a lot. sure, you may want to lock single user mode down a little deeper, but you can do that with GRUB and it can ALWAYS be gotten into with a boot disk... |
Oldguy
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 03, 2003 - 03:05 am: |
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Does anyone have any idea what these people are talking/typing about? |
Mikej
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 03, 2003 - 08:23 am: |
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Yep, they're discussing muffler bearings and trying to decide if synthetic is okay to use during heavy downloads or if it's better to spread the synthetic on bread with a little butter and Spam.
Hope this helps. 
edited by mikej on December 03, 2003 |
M1combat
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 03, 2003 - 11:07 am: |
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Sorry mike, I'm not the muffler bearing kind of guy... |
Mikej
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 03, 2003 - 11:23 am: |
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That's alright, when I read "distro-war" I thought it said "disco-war" and an image of John Travolta dancing with Olivia Newton John popped into my head, she had a mouse cord for a belt on her dress and he was wearing a Mac on his head. Had to smack my left temple to change the channel quick before the sound bite started to play. Whew, that was close.
Okay, bits bytes and buzzwords, back to the match.
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M1combat
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 03, 2003 - 01:09 pm: |
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LOL |
Phillyblast
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 03, 2003 - 01:53 pm: |
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Geez M1, you wouldn't recommend Gentoo to a noob? Hey, I'm only on day 4 or 5 of an install on my workstation at home (damn aic7xxx drivers) 
Overall General Purpose I agree w/ RedHat (although I personally don't use it - started on Debian 7 years ago and haven't strayed much since - sure the installer sucks but I only have to do that once).
On the backup thing - the cost of USB external drives is coming Waaaay down, like 130 bucks or so for basic ones. Great for laptop users that can't install a second disk, and relatively cheap portable insurance. As a "ferinstance" say someone breaks into your house and steals your pc? Or a lightning strike or power surge fries your disk? If your backups were on a second internal disk, well, they were stolen or fried, too. With an external disk you buy a new pc when the insurance company gets done, and restore all your data, assuming the external disk wasn't plugged into the stolen pc at the time |
Doncasto
| | Posted on Sunday, February 01, 2004 - 12:01 pm: |
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Thanks to all the great input on this subject I am happy to say that I have narrowly avoided being infected by the MyDoom worm.
After reading about all the security issues, I cranked up my XP based security to max and began using my ISP's web site based email page rather than allowing email to arrive in my systems Outlook program unscreened. About a day before the MyDoom worm hit the news, I got one of those weird emails -from "Mail Delivery System" with a secondary message "This Server Does Not Accept Email" along with the " The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has been sent as a binary attachment" message in the body.
It was from a Daves@xxxxxx.xxxx (did not make a note of the address, sorry) and for just a moment I was tempted to open the attachment because the sendor might be the BWB DaveS. Better sense prevailed and I deleted it from the website email page and then ran a full virus scan of my system just to make sure I had not been infected anyway.
I did finally find a fully functional XP compatible backup program from Stomp, Inc. They are apparently a subsidiary of Veritas - the company that bought out Seagate, the maker of the backup software I was attempting to replace. They provide a 30 day trial download which can be accessed at http://www.stompinc.com/trial/index.phtml?stp
I have been using the for my backups for over a month without a hitch. I bagged my plan to purchase any more of the Norton Systemworks shamware. They continue to gut the functionality while adding back token (IMHO) features that for my use degrade the value for dollar of the software.
Thanks again to everyone that contributed to my education and eventual rescue!
Don Casto
Boulder, Colorado
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Easyflier
| | Posted on Sunday, February 01, 2004 - 10:13 pm: |
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This is a site for a very good anti-virus software that is free for home use in case anyone is running unprotected these days http://www.avast.com/
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