Vitaliy wrote:

> What software do you use for incremental backups? 

Acronis TrueImage.

> What OS do you run on your server?

Win2k. A simple workgroup file server.

> How hard is it to get the Tuesday version of a particular file?

Easy. The backup file is available over the network, so I just run
TrueImage, tell it to mount a backup as a drive, select the appropriate
incremental backup (it handles the management of incrementals and base
backup automatically, so in the mounted incremental backup you get the base
backup plus all incremental backups up to the selected one), let it mount
the drive, and copy the file. 

> And if I understand correctly, if your hard drive gets zapped on Friday,
> you lose an entire week?

Depends. There are (almost) always two onsite copies of all backups: the
internal disk (that's the one that's being used) and the external disk (to
which all backups are copied immediately). So if you are talking about a
simple disk crash, at the most I'd lose an incremental backup (if the
internal disk crashes exactly after the backup was started and before it
was completely copied). 

If you are concerned about hard drive crashes, using a second fixed drive
set up as a software RAID (or even setting up the external disk as a
software RAID, but I don't have experience with such a setup) should make
this a really remote problem. Of course, there's lightning and other
problems that could affect both drives at once, but having decent wiring, a
decent UPS and in general always an external device between any wire from
the outside and sensitive systems (router, external modem, etc.) seems to
be a good insurance against this. In Brazilian tropical summer storms I had
several such "front end" equipment blown up, but never a computer (or
devices inside a computer) connected behind them.

Gerhard

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