CompuServe Messages

David, Only a few hours ago, running a program I'd never used before, the computer locked up while about to save a file. I waited and waited and nothing seemed to be happening, so I reset the computer. During rebooting, a requester popped up to tell me that the disk DH0: (my boot partition) could not be validated, and booting stopped at that point. That's it, I thought, I've been reading and sending messages all weekend about get a backup system for my hard disk, and it's gone and died on me! Not so. I turned the computer off, paced round the room for a few minutes, turned it on again, and everything worked fine! I _must_ be lucky! You mention that one needs to develop the discipline to keep up with a backup regimen as well. Well, some time ago, I wrote a little program for automatically running other programs after a set period (days or weeks). With the CRON-type programs I've seen, you specify the time when an event is to happen and then the event is processed when that time comes round. My program works differently in that it works on elapsed time. So if I schedule a program to be run every four days, and I go away for a week, when I come back and boot the machine, the program will be run automatically, regardless of the time of day or day of the week. If making a backup can be achieved through calling a program (or executing a script) with no further intervention apart from loading a tape into the streamer, then the whole process will be totally automated by adding a line to my user-startup. Regards, Shraddhan – via Whap! from Hertfordshire in the UK