The Beat Goes On

By Jerry Pournelle

October 24, 2005

(The Beat Goes On :  Page 1 of 1 )

Column 303 (Continued from the Previous Week)

Mirra and Backing Up Outlook

I am pleased to report that I have tamed Outlook, and the Mirra Personal Server works like a charm to back up Outlook 2003 including the .pst files. I have never had a backup system that was easier to set up and less intrusive in use.

The Mirra system consists of a small Linux box that connects to your local Microsoft network. You can put it anywhere. At Chaos Manor the Mirra box sits in the cable room next to the big D-Link Gigabit Switch that holds my network together. It has been in there for months now, and has never needed attention. Mirra is the bee's knees for small-network backups; it's not powerful enough for medium- or larger-networks (but it's not designed for them, either).

Once the Mirra box is running properly, you install some client software on each machine that you want to have backed up. When that's running, you tell the Mirra what files, or more likely folders, you want it to back up. Then you forget it's there until you need to recover the files. That's it.

Well, very nearly it, anyway. I still have one current complaint, and one former complaint. The current one is minor. The former one was major, but I've resolved it.

The minor complaint is that Mirra's software keeps thinking my Chaosmanor folder, which holds the master copies of my web site www.jerrypournelle.com for use by FrontPage, has system files in it. We are not sure why it thinks that. Mirra is aware of the problem and is working on it. Meanwhile I've found a kludge so the problem isn't serious.

The major complaint was far more serious.

Mirra doesn't do backups at a set time: it does them RIGHT NOW when you make changes to files it has been told to watch. It's making a backup of this column as I write it, but it does it so unobtrusively that I don't notice it.

It does the same thing with the outlook.p

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