Backups, And "The Slot."

I'm pretty fastidious about backups. My main office PC has an internal, IDE-connected, 30 gigabyte (compressed) tape drive from OnStream (http://www.onstream.com/). Using Retrospect backup software from Dantz (http://www.dantz.com/), I automatically back up all the systems on my network, every night.

Retrospect does an admirable, and in my experience an unparalleled job, of making it easy to perform full and true incremental backups (which means backing up only the files that have changed or been added since the last full or incremental backup). It also allows me to maintain multiple backup sets, while still making it easy to restore a drive to exactly the state it was in after any one of a series of incremental backups. Which is not a trivial task.

Not only does Retrospect back up my main systems, but any time one of my notebooks shows up on the wireless LAN, Retrospect quickly notices and, if it's time, goes ahead and backs up any of their files that are necessary. As I said, I'm fastidious about preserving my data, because I shudder at losing all my work to the inevitable hard disk disaster. (Indeed, the hard drives in two of my years-old notebooks gave up the ghost within the past few months, one of them making the most incredible, and sad, grinding noises...)

Since I'm so careful to keep things safe in the office, what do I do while I'm on the road? A few weeks ago while I was at COMDEX is a particularly good example, since I was working on the COMDEX RCFoC issue (http://www5.compaq.com/rcfoc/20001127.html) most evenings (party -- what party? Shush). So I had a lot of work sitting on my notebook's hard disk that I'd REALLY have hated to lose!

When I'm traveling and working on a normal (mostly text) RCFoC issue, I can Email the relatively small file to myself once a day, so it's safe and sound on my Email server in case anything happens to my notebook. But the graphics-rich COMDEX issue is another matter -- unless I have a hotel room with a high speed Internet connection (no such luck), there are far too many megabytes of text-plus-pictures for that solution.

Enter, "The Slot."

Specifically, my notebook's "PCMCIA slot" (or PC Card slot, to be politically correct), plus a marvelous 1-gigabyte CallunaCard hard disk card that fits into any Type III PCMCIA slot (http://www.calluna.com/type3spec.html).

(A "Type III" slot is the normal double-high slot that accommodates two thinner "Type II" PCMCIA cards, such as most modems and Ethernet cards, but which can alternately take one, thicker, Type III card.)

This PCMCIA disk card has been a tremendous insurance policy for me for a couple of years; it easily backs up huge on-the-road projects like the COMDEX issues, and it's also an easy way to carry a backup of the very large animation-plus-video presentation that I use during my "RCFoC Seminars." Because Windows has the drivers for these disk cards built-in, it's trivial to transfer the files to most any notebook. And believe me, that's a very good safety net.

But there has been one minor fly in this ointment. Because this thick Type III card takes up both of the PCMCIA slots, I have to remove the Ethernet card and the SmartMedia card reader (which allows me to instantly transfer pictures from my digital camera). That's hardly an insurmountable problem, but swapping cards in and out has been known to make the operating system somewhat less than stable, so another solution might be nice. And indeed, one has just come along:

The card on the left is my original Type III card, while the one on the right is Calluna's new 650-megabyte "MoveIt" card (http://www.calluna.com/move-it.html). It's a Type II device, which means I can leave another PCMCIA card plugged in and still assure that everything is backed-up "just in case."

And come to think of it, this thinner size opens up some interesting possibilities for PDAs that might only take a Type II card -- imagine a 650-megabyte PDA! This is something I'll have to try out. And of course this is only the beginning, because Calluna expects higher capacities next year in this same thin package.

I may have been a bit long-winded on the subject of backups, but it's something I am passionate about, with good reason. A friend of mine's notebook recently corrupted its hard disk (software-wise -- the drive continues to work fine) and she lost four years worth of historical work files that had been merrily going round and round, un-backed up.

No backup solution is perfect, but without one, it's a game of Russian Roulette. And that's a game we'll always lose!

This is an excerpt from the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing, " a free weekly multimedia technology journal written by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal Member of Technical Staff for the Corporate Strategy group at Compaq. A more extensive version of this discussion, as well as others around the innovations and trends of contemporary computing and the technologies that drive them, are available at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc . Jeff's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Compaq. The RCFoC is a service of, and Copyright 2000, Compaq Computer Corp."