Today, Lang Murphy made these interesting comments ...
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> Why would he not want to schedule a defrag and backup
> overnight? Easy... Can you say "paranoid malcontent?"
>[/color]
I'll reply just for myself: I do not schedule ANYTHING at night,
even though I have an APC UPS for battery backup. The battery is
only good for about 20 mintutes, then it will attempt to shut the
PC down gently. In my city, we have several, sometimes many, very
short hits during the day or at night. Some are very short duration
brownouts and the others are very short duration blackouts. Usually
the power is off only 100-200 ms, just enough to blink the lights
and make the APC boxes on my 2 PC beep a warning. But,
occasionally, we will get 5, 10, 20, minute total blackouts and
very occasionally 1,2 6 hour jobs. I partially lost a partition
doing a defrag during one of the longer ones before I had UPS and
lost my entire C:\ partition from a mutli-hour blackout that it was
very difficult to even get the XP install CD to FDISK and format
the drive.

The catastrophic failure was actually due to Partition Magic 8.0
being about 30-40 minutes into what should have been a 2-3 hour
change when the power went out. You can imagine what happened. I
learned two valuable lessons from that: never run PM on a drive
without an image backup and don't run the PC anymore without UPS.

Now as to monitoring or not. One builds judgement not only from
doing things right, but from learning from things done wrong. In
fact, GOOD judgement cannot be formed without making some mistakes,
but learning from them. So, those of us who are paranoid to a
lessor or greater degree have had their fingers burned in the past
and didn't like it. To them who've been successful, I congratulate
you, and to each his/her own! <grin>

--
HP, aka Jerry