Simple Windows Backup to CD/DVD?

Meri051846 asks: "I am looking for a simple backup for my own use. Ideally, this backup would be able to span from one CD to the next for 'overflow'. Right now I am just using 'Easy CD Creator' and choosing what I want backed up and saving it so that I can backup most every day or so. One problem I am having is that my backup material is growing and won't fit on one CD. Also, when I add new items to 'My Documents', for example, I have to go into my program and make sure that new document will be included in the backup. (Even when I ask 'Easy CD Creator' to update the backup, the new items are not included. It just updates the old ones.) It usually isn't, so I have to manually add it to my 'backup program'. I hope I am making myself clear. Is there any backup program that will fullfil my wishes or am I dreaming of 'things to come'?"

Comments

How much data

[maxume]

Are you changing 700MB of data every day? If you aren't, just try to split stuff up more, and only back up what you happen to work on that day. Unless you are working with large chunks of a pretty big data set, across the entire data set, you should be able to keep going for quite a while just by splitting things up a bit.

Windows Backup?

[vapspwi]

Are you using Win2K or WinXP? The backup program included in those versions of the OS, while somewhat clunky, is fairly full featured. You can do incremental backups and stuff like that, which should cut down on the amount of stuff you're burning every day.

The file that is generated by Windows Backup apparently isn't compressed, so you can zip it up and save a good bit of space. If that still won't fit on a CD, I'm not entirely sure what to do. Will something like WinZip span CDs the way you used to be able to span floppies with PKZip? I've honestly never had to deal with that particular problem before...

JRjr

Re:Windows Backup?

[rekkanoryo]

Are you using Win2K or WinXP? The backup program included in those versions of the OS, while somewhat clunky, is fairly full featured. You can do incremental backups and stuff like that, which should cut down on the amount of stuff you're burning every day.

The file that is generated by Windows Backup apparently isn't compressed, so you can zip it up and save a good bit of space. If that still won't fit on a CD, I'm not entirely sure what to do. Will something like WinZip span CDs the way you used to be able to span floppies with PKZip? I've honestly never had to deal with that particular problem before...

Yes, and the Win2k/XP backup program (winkey+r, type ntbackup, hit enter--quickest access) can be scheduled to run at given times as well. Just specify when using the backup wizard that you want to run it later and specify the schedule.

For splitting the archives, WinRAR works extremely well. You can compare compression with RAR and ZIP yourself if you want, but I usually use RAR with maximum compression as I find this option usually gives me rather good compression, second only to bzip2 compression. There is a specific option for WinRAR to split directly to 700MB CD size, which you can then burn with CD Creator. The "700MB" size leaves a little under a meg free space on the CD (700MB CD-Rs are really 703MB and some change), so it works quite nicely. It can also split to 650MB CD size, or to a custom size (ideal for you DVD recorder users for the time being). But you do need the temporary disk space to do this.

Note also that Win2k/XP's Backup performs somewhat better (from my observations) if the output file is located on an NTFS partition rather than a FAT32 partition. No clue why, though. The output file MUST be on a separate partition if the entire partition will be backed up, or in a different directory if only selected directories will be backed up.

Happy archiving!

Norton Ghost?

[strangel]

As far as I know, doesn't Norton Ghost offer this functionality? I don't have it installed at the moment, but I think it has an option to backup to a CD/DVD.

Re:Norton Ghost?

[rekkanoryo]

Yes, Ghost *does* offer this functionality, but it often wastes as much as 100 MB per CD. That and it requires a reboot *every* time you run a backup with it. Windows' built-in backup program on 2k/XP coupled with WinRAR archive splitting as I discussed here is a better option in this case, as it never requires a reboot.

Hint

[m0rph3us0]

DOS and I think NT, has an archive bit, when ever a file is modified the archive bit is set.

Backup programs should clear the archive bit.

Just select files with the archive bit set. Setup WinZIP to make 700 meg zip files of all the files on your HD with the archive bit set except the dir where you store your zip files and then burn the zip files.

Also what you may want to do to start your backups is burn a knoppix CD and use it to make an image of your hd with dd. Then when you loose your hd you restore the image, boot windows and restore your zip files.

Just remember to create new images after you increase your hard drive size. as the image is only good for the size of your current drive.

NTI

[mechugena]

I have been using NTI Backup Now for the past few months with great succes. It pretty much does exactly what you're looking for.

Another option: network-based backup

[uradu]

Set up a Linux machine as a backup master with a large hard drive, they're cheaper than most tape drives or DVD drives nowadays. A script mounts Samba shares to each of the machines on the network in turn and zips up specific folders recursively in update mode (-ru) to a file on the backup server. Set up a cron job to execute this script at midnight or whatever.

For example, you would set up this "spider" script to crawl all your Windows machines, mount //WindowsHost/c$ to /mnt/backup (or set up custom shares on all machines), and zip up the "/My Documents" folder plus any other ones you keep stuff in.

While very low-tech, this approach has the advantage that the backup archive is a plain zip file that you can browse and extract individual files from with tons of tools on just about any platform. Plus, after the initial archive creation (which takes a while for large directory structures), updates are very quick.

Mirror the backup to two different drives if you're paranoid. Two 120GB drives run less than $200 and provide quite a bit of home-level data safety. Get a couple of hard drive sleds so you can swap the drives out at any moment, and you're set.

Re:Another option: network-based backup

[uradu]

> I'm still figuring out XP's permissions

Well, XP can make sharing difficult, particularly when policies come into play. The easiest thing is to just mount //host/c$ as Administrator (or equivalent) on that local machine. This works even if policies disable sharing and doesn't rely on any shares being set up on that machine. In a home environment it shouldn't matter too much that you have those plain text passwords sitting in a shell script. Just make sure only root has access to it.

Re:hard drives are cheap

[The Mayor]

Perhaps you mean RAID 1? RAID 0 is disk striping--it will improve disk performance at the cost of data integrity. If either disk fails with RAID 0 then the data on both drives likely will be lost. RAID 1 (and RAID 5, if you buy an expensive enough RAID controller) specifies redundant storage so that a failure on one drive can be recovered.

Re:Ghost or RAID?

[m0rph3us0]

Ghost is a pain in the ass. Personally I a knoppix cd customized with a private key, a little menu system that automates these two commands:

dd if=/dev/ | ssh backups@backup.server | gzip > ~/--

and

ssh backups@backup.server cat ~/-- | dd of=/dev/

Note ssh already compresses so putting the gzip on the side of the client is a double whammy for the CPU, however if you have multiple boxes it may be more effective to do it that way.

Go to your local computer superstore...

[stienman]

I needed the exact same thing for my office server backups (~2-3GB) onto a DVD drive. I couldn't find anything online that fit the bill, but I recently browsed the computer store (CompUsa in this case) and got a $70 package which does exactly what you want, including compression and all the usual backup/restore facilities you want to be used to. I have it set up with 5 DVD-RWs, one for each weekday, and I do a full backup to each since there's no need for speed or the hassle of incremental or differential backups.

Unfortunately for you, I don't recall the name of the package I'm using. Probably something like "BackupMyPC" or something like that. It had the two features I needed: Backup of network drives (some backup programs limit you so they can charge more for the 'professional' version) and backup directly to DVD - in this case a DVD+/-R/RW Firewire/USB2.0 (firewire worked, USB 2.0 didn't)

There were two different packages (same cost) that did what I needed. This one is an adaptation of, IIRC, Veritas backup software, so I chose it based on that.

Anyway, they exist. If you need to know the particular package I'm using, post a reply here to remind me, and I'll post it as a reply to this message in a day or two.

Nevermind, here it is.

-Adam

Low tech: scheduled batch, zip and CD-RW

[digitect]

I used a relatively simple MS-DOS batch file for just this purpose for years. All you need are 24 CD-RW (for one year's worth of backups), Zip (WinZIP's command line is what I used), a CD drive that can be accessed as a drive letter (Drive Letter Access (DLA) or some other proprietary name), and basic command line ability.

Have the batch compress each folder into a temp file by the same name (in \windows\temp or something) and then copy each to CD-RW. Use Window's scheduler (all have it, I use Win95a) to run the batch every night and rotate CD-RWs for each day of the week ("child"). Each Friday, rotate one of four separate CD-RW's ("father", a child grows up), and the first Friday of every month, retire one permenantly ("grandfather", a father stops working).

I actually clean off the temp zip files each night and re-write them in entirety. There are more complex, only-changed-since-last-backup, archive bit methods, but I like this simple-minded organization and being able to have immediate access to any previous day within 7, any previous week within 4, and any previous month indefinitely. Plus the Zip files in temp are redundant with the CD, meaning every file exists three places at any time. Also, media is not re-used too often in this scheme (it retires when "old"), and there aren't multi-media dependencies which can botch the entire system if a single tape goes bad.

Of course, this was up to a few months ago when my drive crashed, I completely bailed to Linux, and re-wrote the whole thing as a Bash script. I also now have more content than will fit on a disk bzipped, but it's essentially the same process except that I have odd/even day staggering and only half the redundancy. But at least I always know what's on any given disk and know how to go back to any given time to find backups if needed. (The BackupExec our NT servers use at work, OTOH, is abysmal in reliability, setup and actually trying to restore a file in less than an hour. Probably theoretically more sound, but darned if I can see that it has more *practical* application.)

Re:What I do

[itzdandy]

first
NERO=GOOD

second.
FAT32 will only do -40GB(i can't remember exactly),

third
seagate sucks for IDE get WD.

fourth, how about daily backups, should i get a new harddrive for every day?

fifth, how about "backup" data and not "archive" data. You need to back data up so that it may be restored with permissions and directoryies correctly.

sixth.
hey, if the drive CRASHES you can't really get the data off of it to use the windows "re-import all your settings

seventh
Who wants to reinstall windows and all the settings if something goes wrong if they can just restore it from backup?

eighth
"the chances of a hard drive that is unused crashing are so astronomically small, don't worry about it" - guess what? 90% of all hard drives that fail are not installed in a computer but being stored or moved.

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the answer(s)
(1)
=====
get a removable rack hard drive(WD - very large), partition it into equal blocks the maximum size of a FAT32 partition(use FAT32 for compatability) and put it in an external USB2.0 box.
use a command line zip utility to zip the entire drive up using the -ur options and working from the root directory to a file on the partitions of the USB drive. Name the file by the date and save it to the USB2.0 hard drive and overwrite the first file and rename it weekly.
the -u updates the file so you only change files that need changed which saves you time.
Then weekly you also make a copy of the latest backup file and name it by the week and keep those for six months. you can also burn these backup images off to cd-r or dvd-r for backup redundancy.

To restore your system, you can boot off a floppy and unzip the files from your USB2.0 drive to the disk, and hopefully you made a copy of the MBR onto the floppy so you can restore that as well. The USB2.0 drive holder should have come with a DOS floppy driver or if your luck your BIOS can recognize this drive.
some other compression utilities offer similar options to avoid re-copying files for no reason. Using the old backups will make your backup process faster after the first week because of this -u option.
=====
(2)
=====
use Nero and "burn HD backup" from the file menu
this has some limitations. First, it doesn't like backing up active file systems(like your windows OS install) but it can, just nothing else can be running or accessing the disk while the backup is happening.
secondly, it can only restore a backup completely, overwriteing the entire partition it is restoring to.
third. individual files cannot be extraced from the archive, only the WHOLE system.
also, this cannot burn to DVD yet. maybee in 6.5, but not 6.
=====
(3)
=====
get a real backup program, dedicated to this=money.

CDR and Optical Media Sucks

[jradi]

I tried to recover files off CDR's I burned 5 years ago and realized that CDR's don't last forever. Turns out that they fade really quickly, and if you bought a bad batch - the entire set may be corrupted in a few years.

There's lots of research on what happens to CDR's after several years, unfortunately they haven't been around that long (in mass use).

After my latest catastrophe, I've switched to backing to a portable HD, AND making 2 annual backups to CDR (using DIFFERENT brands of CDR). Hopefully Kodak or one of the big boys is working on a true archival quality cdr - till then, DIVERSIFY to save some grief!

WinZip 9 beta now supports encyption.

[Futurepower(R)]

The new WinZip 9.0 beta has AES encryption, that is being added in the best possible way:

AES Encryption Information

AES Coding Tips for Developers

There are many new features to this upgrade. Upgrades are free to registered users.

WinZip has a spanning option: "-&[w] Span to multiple removable disks. Use the optional w suffix to wipe out all files on the removable disk." However, I've never used it, and I don't think it writes directly to DVDs or CDs. There is no way to have WinZip span to multiple zip files of specified length, apparently.

Re:A thought...

[maxume]

cdrecord for windows
Unxutils for windows (Includes tar, no cygwin, native)
zsh for windows (no longer maintained)
And of course, cygwin comes with bash, there are probably others...

RAID is never, never, never for backups

[sasami]

Have you considered putting another hard disk in the computer and using RAID?

No! RAID is not a substitute for backups! The only thing RAID protects against is disk failure. Even assuming that RAID works perfectly, which it doesn't, how many other ways are there to lose data?

- Accidental deletion. Ever needed to get a file off backup because of your mistake?
- Accidental overwrite. "Crap, I lost my original!"
- Malicious attack. Better hope your antivirus is up to date.
- Catastrophe. Fire, flood, power surge... or just shoving the machine off the desk onto the floor.
- Corruption. Your RAM goes flaky and munges your file, which you blissfully save to disk. Thanks to RAID, you have reliable access to your bad data.

Backups go to removable media. Period. And for anything even remotely important, like financial records, you keep one offsite.

--
Dum de dum.