Drives Aplenty

Since getting the Blitz interface from APDL and an additional 128 GigaByte hard drive to augment the one I already had as a backup drive, I have (after an initial trial that made one of my RiscPCs up to four 'slices' high!) settled on mounting this sub-assembly of interface and two drives into the one-slice RiscPC and making it up to a more manageable (than four) three-slice computer, with one Blitz-connected drive in each of the upper slices.

I had two spare slices so that was not an issue; and now I have partitioned each of the two backup drives into three partitions: one of 32 GigaBytes (GB) for the weekly 'generational' full backups, another 32 GB for the monthly backups, and the remaining 64 GB for other categories of backups.

As you can see, the drives on my local network.now number twelve...

Of course, the drive currently named One-Slice will now need to be changed, but I shall need to check through that computer's !Boot structure for any reference to the drive by name and change it. Alternatively I might cheat and 'share' that drive under a more appropriate name rather than the actual name of the drive – easy enough to do. In fact, the drive named Portable in that image above is such an instance of an 'alias', because there are good reasons for leaving that particular drive named as HardDisc4 – its default.

As you have probably guessed, the three partitions are named Weekly, Mnthly and Other, prefixed by BU1 or BU2 as appropriate. The Backup2 partitions are safety mirrors of the Backup1 'logical drives'. The other two main computers are Iyonix (self-explanatory) and Fax/Comms – though I don't use the fax facility these days nor the dial-up communications options I once had available, for a while in parallel with the broadband connection (while I was testing the latter's dependability).

Each of those computers has a second drive, and nowadays my datafiles are so big altogether that I have separated their weekly backups from the other stuff that is common to all my computers (!Boot, Programs, Utilities and Games) and their six generations are stored on these drives, again one being a mirror of the other.

It all seems to be working very well, and I have a noticeably less cluttered display of all the backup folders on the three-slice RiscPC's slightly smaller monitor, relative to the one I showed you exactly a month ago. Having each drive partitioned into just three rather than the eight I had back then has helped in the new arrangement, and overall I am very pleased with what I have done.

For one thing, it has left so much space on several drives that there will be no problem storing at least three local copies of even the GigaByte-plus files produced by my Sony HandyCam camcorder, at least for a very long time to come!