Your maintenace plan?

What is your maintenace plan? I mean all the stuff, backup, updating, antivirus, firewall etc.

I have about 15 Gb of photograps, and rapidly growing. I have two separate HDD's, and I backup those files daily basis to another HDD by SyncToy. Same thing with personal documents and favorites. I have MP3's also, all ripped from my own CD's. I back them daily also, though I could rip them when ever again.

I run disk defrag: %windir%\system32\defrag.exe /c /u /v /x on every startup.

So how about better backup plan? That I have not yet implmented.

What else are you doing to keep system up ang healthy?

I don't want to use more money on software, so I'd like to manage things with OS's stuff.

I have McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.7.0i, updates at startup.

I keep my computer shut down when I'm not doing something with it. I also have VMware Server 2.0.1 and couple of VM's in it. Thats mainly for training and fun.

I use OS's own firewall with factory settings.

Any suggestions?

One thing you might want to add is an off site backup. If you ever had a fire/flood your backup would also be under water.

Another, is to backup to 2 kinds of media, so if you dvd player goes down you have a way of restoring.

Ken

1). I use a dedicated file server box at home for all of my data and simply map drives to this server from my workstations. I don't install programs or otherwise on the server. It just sits in the back room of the basement and runs.

2). My server has 2 hard drives installed. 1 running the OS with a partition dedicated to data. 3 shares on the data partition. a) music b) data c) downloads. Every 12 hours I run a backup job using robocopy to copy all of the data from my 3 shares to the second hard drive on the server. My music is all from my own cd's as well, but I'd rather back them up instead of having to rip them again.

3). Once per week, I manually attach an external drive and run a different robocopy job which mirrors the external drive to what is on my storage partition

4). Also, about every 2 weeks, I manually attach another external hard drive and run robocopy and mirror the external drive to what is on my storage partition. This drive is stored off-site in my work desk drawer.

5). On the days that I take my offsite storage home, I first bring in the other drive from home. This way I'm never in a position where all of my drives and backup are in the house at the same time.

Until very recently I've never backed up in my 22 year life.

Anyways, as far as maintenance goes, the yearly reinstall works well. I back up to an external hard drive. I run ccleaner occasionally (not on Win7, as I don't know how compatible it is yet), disk defrag as well (used defragler, but same issue now though). I presume that the odds of both my hard drives failing at the same time are somewhat low, and I don't have too much of value, just a bunch of old documents I haven't looked at in a year and a large collection of pictures I've drawn or edited.

There's a couple much simpler options. I ahve 22 hd's in my main computer. Multiple raid6 array's covers drive failure. if you're worried about corruption, how about something like a nightly backup with software like acronis true image? if you're talking irreplacable data, there shouldn't be that much you need to back up, that a simple extra drive can't back up. I have 10tb of drive space, I don't back up all of it. It's just not worth while. With my web server, I have redundant machines, and additional alternate machines in a different data center. You have those options too, though they're pretty extreme for the standard user.

Zen00 said:

I run ccleaner occasionally (not on Win7, as I don't know how compatible it is yet)

Works fine for me, it did on the Beta and R.C.

I have a 300GB that I backup to once a month, CCleaner every other day, and a reformat once a year.

nasomi said:

There's a couple much simpler options. I ahve 22 hd's in my main computer.

And a power surge, fire, flood, or theft could result in losing all of that instantly.

nasomi said:

I have 10tb of drive space

Out of curiosity, what exactly do you fill up that kind of space with?? I've worked for numerous companies with Storage Area Networks like EMC and NetApp that didn't have that much disk space.