You've given me quite an education and I appreciate it. Sally (my friend and
the tech) is suggesting that I use one computer as a FileServer and have it
store all data there. That means I will have any applications on the
individual machines and use the third computer (FileServer) to store data
only. Seems like a waste of one machine but I don't really need all 3 right
now.
Your friend will know more about your circumstances than I will and
I'm no expert on networks. I don't understand why you need the three
computers unless different people are using them or they are separated
from each other so much as to give you difficulty walking back and
forth.
I don't understand your friend's idea of a dedicated fileserver in
such a small environment. Are you in an office environment or using a
home network? The main advantage of a home network is so people can
access their computers and/or the internet simultaneously. Or maybe
one person has a specific interest such as music, video or CAD,
requiring a dedicated machine. So they would use one machine for the
dedicated software but may need to access files on another computer.
It sounds to me from what you've said, that you are more concerned
with disk space for data storage. You don't need to go through the
hassle of setting up a network for that. I'm running 120 gig off one
hard drive slot and I could easily double that using the other primary
slot. Even at that, I'd have a really small storage capacity. You
could easily run over 500 gigs off one Pentium machine. Some people
run over 1000 gigs.
For security puposes, however, related to hard drive crashes, the more
drives the merrier. What happens if the file server crashes with all
your goodies on it? Hopefully you will be backed up. From that
perspective, it's better to spread your data over different
machines/drives and even over different partitions on the same drive.
Some people set up a partition on a hard drive for data only. That
makes backups a lot easier, and possible recovery in the event of a
crash.. A program like Partition Magic lets you setup partitions very
easily.
As I said in an earlier reply, the main hassle with three computers is
running applications on the others from the one you're currently on.
Each XP computer has it's own desktop and Explorer (not Internet
Explorer). If you hit control - alt - delete you get the task manager.
Look under the processes tab and you'll see a file called
Explorer.exe. That's the main shell of Windows. You can't normally
access that from another machine, so you can't start applications from
another machine.
There is a way to do that with XP but I'm not familiar with how it
works. In larger office setups, they keep the applications on a server
of their own so people can access them from their workstations. But I
think that's well beyond what you're talking about. Maybe someone else
in this ng can shed some kight on that.
She said she knows of some pretty expensive backup software (I think about
$100 to $200) that will be easy for me to learn and use. I think I will have
to also buy a DVD rewriter to use with it. She says this software will
backup the OS for all the computers as well as the data separately and that
I can make a backup everyday if I want and then carry the DVD to my safety
deposit box. What do you think?
DVD vs, CDROM is the old argument of floppy disks vs Zip disks. A
re-writable DVD holds over 2.5 gig while a CDROM disk holds about 700
megs. CDROMS are a lot cheaper. I can buy 10-packs of Memorex read
only CDROM disks for under $10. I know I can rely on the particular
Memorex brand I buy. I've never had a drop out or failure. I haven't
checked the price of re-writables lately.
CDROM technology is not what you might think. And DVD technology is
even newer. When you are writing 2.5 gigs of data to a single disk,
the distances between data tracks are becoming exceedingly small. To
give an example, in the old days a 5 meg hard disk platter was 18" in
diameter and the 5 megs was spread out at 1000 tracks per inch.
Compare that 1000 tracks per inch for 5 megs to the current 1.5 gig on
a disks less that half that diameter.
They have done marvelous things with storage technology and they will
go farther. But you have to be very aware of quality and the
possibility of the storage medium failing. I'm not ready to trust DVD
disks just yet and even with CDROM disks I can trust, I make multiple
copies of data I consider valuable. I make 3 copies of each CDROM I
have holding critical data. At a dollar a piece, that's not a bad
investment. If you're going with CDROMS, don't cheap out on the cost.
As far as software is concerned, NERO seems to be the most popular out
there. I tried Roxio at one time and ended up with a lot of coasters.
It's not that their writing software is bad, it's that they came up
with this ridiculous setup whereby the software for writing
re-writable media (DirectCD) tried to take over the entire CD player.
If you wanted to use your CD drive for something else, DirectCD would
often hold on to it and not allow you to use it. Roxio seemed
oblivious to rectifying this situation.
You have to ask yourself what kind of backup you need. If it's a
business related backup where a database changes regularly, and you
want incremental backups, then you'll need software that does this
procedure. But, if it's just a matter of dragging files to a
re-writable drive, most CDROM software has that capability. XP even
has it's own CD writer, although I've never used it.
Keeping your backup copies in a safety deposit box is the ultimate, I
guess.
