" Approaches to Backing Up your Hard Drive"
March Meeting
 The March meeting was presented by Gene Barlow of
User Group Relations. He announced that Power Quest had been bought by Symantic,
at the end of 2003, and that negotiations were ongoing to represent them in the
future.
Gene began with some startling recommendations published recently
in PC World magazine.
For example; they recommended that data files be backed
up daily to ensure minimum loss of data when, not if, the hard drive fails!  They
also recommended that a full hard drive backup be peformed weekly to minimize
the recovery time when drive failure does occur. Gene pointed out that the life
of a hard drive is typically 3 to 4 years.
He then addressed the fact that should
you decide to sell or give away an old hard drive, you need to wipe it clean
first! Security of your data is not maintained by just deleting the files on
a hard drive or even re-formatting it! No, according to a study conducted on
hard drives bought from e-bay, the amount of data that could be recovered from
those hard drives proved this point!
He then introduced two products of the White
software company, SecureClean and Wipe Drive. The demonstration of SecureClean
v4 was very impressive, in terms of ease of usee and time to accomplish the task!
Gene pointed out that Wipe Drive v3 is the one to use on hard drives before you
let them get out of your care. It will totally clean the drive so that no data
can be detected or retreived using special tools of the trade.
Gene Barlow then presented a thorough review of several approaches to backing
up your hard drives. Use of partition magic and Drive Image were recommended
to implement these approaches He also recommended several alternatives to use
of CD for backup of the newest large hard drives.
We thank Gene Barlow for another outstanding pre-sentation, the door prizes,
and the software offered at special prices to user group members.
Author: Gene Lease
Date: 03/22/2004
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