I am generally an even, calm person. But there are some things that justabsolutely get under my skin and drive me to screaming frustration, andone of them is flaky, unreliable systems. This is especially the casewhen I can't tell if the problem is hardware, software, or both.

Since I'm writing about this, you might guess that I am dealing withsuch a thing right now. You would be correct; my office workstation hasbecome really flaky ever since I upgraded it from

When I am thinking of backup issues, I tend to strongly separate backupsfrom archives, and in fact I believe that there are two different sortsof backups with different characteristics. Since I think that this is animportant issue, let me explain my distinctions.

To start with, to me the difference between backups and archives isthat backups are for recovering after a system failure, while archivesare for storing data that you no longer keep online. Here, you have toconsider 'system failure' somewhat broadly, so