Maintaining the System: Dell™ Precision™ WorkStation 610 Mini Tower Systems

Overview Data Preservation Cleaning System Components Environmental Factors Power Protection Devices

Overview

Proper use of preventive maintenance procedures can keep the system in top operating condition and minimize the need for costly, time-consuming service procedures. This appendix contains maintenance procedures that you should perform regularly.

Data Preservation

Everyone inadvertently deletes files at one time or another. Also, hard-disk drives can fail after extended use, so it is not a question of whether you will eventually lose data, but when. To avoid such loss of data, you should regularly make backup copies of all hard-disk drive files. Frequent, regular backups are a must for anyone using a hard-disk drive.

Scheduling Backups

The frequency with which backups should be made depends on the amount of storage space on a hard-disk drive and the volatility of the data contained on the drive. Heavily used systems require more frequent backups than systems in which files are seldom changed.

Dell recommends that you back up the hard-disk drive at least once a week, with a daily backup of those files known to have been changed. Following these guidelines ensures the loss of no more than a day's work in the event of a hard-disk drive failure or if you inadvertently delete one or more important files.

As further insurance against data losses, you should keep duplicate copies of the weekly and monthly backups at an off-site location. Doing this ensures that you lose no more than a week's work, even if one of the on-site backups becomes corrupted.

Backup Devices

Tape drives are fast, convenient, and affordable devices that can back up data at rates of up to 1.6 megabytes per second (MB/sec) (sustained, with data compression) and can often run unattended. Dell offers tape drives with storage capacities in the range of 200 MB to 8 gigabytes (GB) per tape cartridge and recommends these drives and their associated backup software for use as system backup devices.

As a last resort, you can back up a hard-disk drive's contents on diskettes, a method that is both time-consuming and prone to human error. Also, backing up a full 540-MB hard-disk drive requires approximately 375 diskettes (when using 1.44-MB diskettes). Therefore, if it is absolutely necessary to use diskettes as backup devices, any unwanted hard-disk drive files should be deleted before a backup procedure is started.

Recovering Data

Some hard-disk drive failures are recoverable. In these cases you may be able to recover all lost data if the proper utility software is available. Even losses such as accidentally deleted files or accidental reformatting of a hard-disk drive can be reversed with these utilities.

If the computer system is running MS-DOS, many apparent data loss problems are due to corruption or erasure of the hard-disk drive's master boot record (MBR), MS-DOS boot sector, or file allocation table (FAT). That is, accidental deletion of files or accidental reformatting of the hard-disk drive alters the MS-DOS boot sector, the FAT, and the root directory.