Backups, what not to do
I learned a pretty important lesson this week in computer backups. I had just rebuilt my work laptop, it had all the trimmings installed correctly (Visual Studio 6, VS.NET 2003, SQL Server, IIS and Crystal Reports). I even tested it and it passed with flying colors everything working perfectly. This is no small accomplishment, especially on work machines. Having successfully accomplished all of this I decided to grab a ghost image of it. The entire ghost pull took roughly 40 minutes, that was of course after 2 days of trying to figure out how to do a ghost pull. It was complete, it was working and it was backed up! Off to a fantastic start, I remembered the old saying “an untested backup is no backup”. So my coworker and I decided we'd try to do a ghost push, this only took 20 minutes to figure out how to do and we were off and running. That's when the problems started. Apparently ghost has a few settings that you want to stay away from, one of them being multicast. Now I'm still not entirely sure how it did so, but my ghost push managed to cause quite a stir on the network and more than a few people were out of connectivity.. Oops. We ended up having to terminate the process that the ghostcast server uses to do its pushes, halfway through the push. I end the week with the laptop being completely unusable. Oops. But we did learn a few things, Thou shall not do multicast ghost pushes. Actually they don't let me do ghost pushes of any sort now. I think I have figured out what I need to do in terms of backups. Here's what I'm going to attempt next, obtain a copy of Norton Ghost 2003 (the corporate edition frightens me), and one of those nifty 250 - 320GB firewire/usb external hard drives. I'll connect the HDD to the computer to be backed up and do a full ghost image of it. Then in theory I can reestablish this ghost image locally without involving the network. I do have a question for anyone out there though, What works best in your opinion for workstation style backups? I'd like to have an clean working image with all software installed so I can try things like Whidbey and Yukon (when its available) without fear of really making a mess.
On another note, I definitely have to get my resume sharpened up and tuned so its recognized by Gretchen, Zoe & Heather (who are all cool). I've got to say I love the blogging that you three are doing, its very cool to learn some of the insides of how MS works in its recruiting processes. For a while I had suspected that this just ate my resume and laughed. Well ok it still might but I have hope now!