PC Genie
What Good is Your Backup?
By Dave Fitts
Recently, one of my staff ran out of hard drive space and needed a new, larger hard
drive. The hard drive was in a laptop with only one drive bay, so it had to be replaced
which was about the same as if it had stopped working or the computer had been lost,
stolen or destroyed. We do backups frequently and I believed that even if this full hard
drive had failed, we would have had a backup tape to restore from.
My plan was simply to backup the hard drive and swap out the drives. I was then going
to restore to the new hard drive from the backup and be done, kind of like replacing the
computer with a new one. Theoretically, in this case the employee would get their computer
back and never know the difference except that the computer would have more room on the
hard drive.
I was able to back up the old drive and restore all the files successfully to the new
drive using the tape drive. When I was done, I restarted the computer expecting Windows 95
to operate like usual but I was wrong!!! Even though all the files including the hidden
ones were backed up and restored successfully, Windows 95 would not run. I called
technical support for our three-year-old tape drive, which by the way came with Windows 95
software, to get some advice. The advice was, "Oh, you can’t do that with that
old tape drive!" I ended up purchasing a new tape drive with software that allows for
a full backup and restore of all files including the Windows 95 operating system.
The moral of this story is you should always test your backup system to see if you can
successfully restore from it, especially if you want to restore your entire operating
system with all its customized settings and preferences, whether it’s Windows 95 or
others! If you can’t restore from your backup you might as well not bother backing
up in the first place. If your backup system has not been tested please test it to
make sure it can do what you expect.
Comments? Questions? Contact David Fitts, the Director of Risk Management, by calling
287-4054, writing 85 State House Station Augusta, Maine, or e-mailing david.a.fitts@state.me.us.
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