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What do you use for complete backup's?
HairyDVD:
One thing you could do is partition a drive and use one of the secondary partitions to hold backup info. The proplem with that is if the drive fails you lose everything.
Another alternative is to use a program like norton ghost and create an image of the hard drive onto dvd-r. It compacts the image as it creates and burns - and in the case of a mishap, you just boot from the dvd and it resets the info on the harddrive in about 15-20mins.
All methods have plus and minus points - pick the one which is best for you. You may want to bear in mind if you will be changing setups and roms etc and how up to date the backup will be.
FhM:
I would do a combination of some of the suggestions above. I would get my cabinet how I wanted it then I would take an image using ghost or clonezilla or similar. I would put this on an exernal hard drive. I would then have a program that would look at the Mame folder and any other folders that were to do with roms and setup etc and mirror this to the external hard drive. Once the inital sync had been done it only saves the changes. I would have this run on startup and or shutdown. The time it would take would be minimal after the first time.
This way you could add a load of roms to your external hd from another computer and when you boot your cab it would copy them over.
My weapon of choice for this would be robocopy from the microsoft resource kit. You can also get a GUI version as well.
This would mean an upto date backup and fast recovery once a dead HD had been replaced.
sac01:
A couple of months ago I was messing around inside my cab and grounded out the circuit board on the 120gig HD in my cab...everything would have been lost (all my mame roms, tones of mp3's for the juke, and every console rom) not to mention all the configuration files, the daphne stuff, etc.... I felt sick...Sooooo I searched around on the web and found a seller on ebay that sells exact replacement circuit boards for all different HD models. I got lucky enough to find one with the same revision and firmware numbers and was able to save everything. This xmas I got a 500 gig HD and ghosted everything over to that and removed the 120gig to keep as a backup...
Moral to my story: If you've had your cab for years and put tons of work into collecting everything on it and getting it just the way you want, it's well worth the investment in another HD to back it all up. Think of how much your time is worth if you billed yourself for all the work.
leapinlew:
--- Quote from: sac01 on January 23, 2008, 08:56:47 am ---A couple of months ago I was messing around inside my cab and grounded out the circuit board on the 120gig HD in my cab...everything would have been lost (all my mame roms, tones of mp3's for the juke, and every console rom) not to mention all the configuration files, the daphne stuff, etc.... I felt sick...Sooooo I searched around on the web and found a seller on ebay that sells exact replacement circuit boards for all different HD models. I got lucky enough to find one with the same revision and firmware numbers and was able to save everything. This xmas I got a 500 gig HD and ghosted everything over to that and removed the 120gig to keep as a backup...
Moral to my story: If you've had your cab for years and put tons of work into collecting everything on it and getting it just the way you want, it's well worth the investment in another HD to back it all up. Think of how much your time is worth if you billed yourself for all the work.
--- End quote ---
And this is why I keep my computers inside their cases whenever possible.
unclet:
I use to use CD-Rs and DVD discs but that turned on to be a pain since I was always tweaking stuff and changing a little bit here and there and also adding things as well.
I know just mirror everything on my main computer. Updating is a breeze now. I simply configure anything new on my main computer and get it working perfectly, then copy everything over to my arcade computer and I am done.
Changing stuff and then having to reburn discs all the time was crazy ... in my opinion. I could never keep the discs up-to-date without going crazy and spending a lot of extra time.
So, I would recommend you just get a spare drive and store everything on that.
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