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Backups to CD-R?
Lumpish Scholar asks: "Backups are important, so we should tell our friends and family to buy a bunch of CD-Rs and...what? The operating system most of them are stuck with comes with backup software, but 'Windows Backup Does Not Back Up to CD-R, CD-RW, or DVD-R Devices (this behavior is by design). I've looked in the obvious places, but nothing comes across as better than adequate. There's got to be something that can do full or incremental backups (which in part means keeping track of what's already been backed up), that can back up files bigger than a single CD-R, and that's relatively fast and easy. What have you used to solve this problem, for yourself or others, for Windows or for better operating systems?"
WHy the hell dosent windos allow backup to CDR? Any rational reason?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I use cpio, tar, and/or pax to archive files into a big ball, then encrypt that ball and burn it to CD (suitable for storing in an untrusted location). tar has builtin date checking, to determine which files need to be backed up, but cpio and pax are much more flexible in that they take a list of files from stdin, so you can use a more advanced routine to determine which files have changed.
I wrote a little shell script to wrap this all into a convenient command, and I'm sure many others have as well.
Mac OSX has no backup at ALL. (ditto doesn't count).
If you spring for '.Mac' you get a crappy buggy backup program, however by default the OS has no backup mechanism whatsoever aside from copying files.
Yes OSX is essentially BSD but you can't even simply use tar as it won't store the weird resource fork data from the HFS+ filing system.
About the simplest way to do it is using DiskUtility to make a virtual disk image and copy data into that using ditto, however this is rather longwinded and a simple Apple supported backup utility supplied with the OS would be greatly appreciated.
Although I've never used it before, Nero BackItUp appears to do what you're looking for. I've bought Ahead's software many times before, and their quality is fairly good. There's a trial version, too.
Just put everything under one folder (for example "%USERPROFILE%\My Documents") and right-click the folder and just "send-to" to the CD Burner (at least under Windows XP). Shouldn't be hard to burn the whole directory hierarchy once in the while. I think this should be enough for majority of the home users who cannot figure out themselves, how to create more sophisticated backup scripts.
Norton Ghost is what I use for multi-disk CD-R backups.
I wrote a little bash script to automate the job. It works on linux and other UN*X-like systems. Actually all it does is write out tarballs in CD sized chunks, then you just burn the .tar files to CD. Because backups may span multiple tapes, tar has some legacy code that lets you span multiple backup destinations. The downside you can't use compression with spanned tars. The upside is if one of your backup tars fails you can still recover the rest of your data (the spanned tars are not dependent on one another).
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Here is a link to the documentation and download:
http://lug.concord.edu/meetings/101520
cached link:
http://lug.concord.edu.nyud.net:8090/meeti
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However, I am starting work on project that has a windows port. I would like to scriptify the backup of windows using dar. Dar is like tar, but compresses, and has the ability to split archives across media (like multiple CDRs). I have not actually used it to recover anything yet, even on linux. My plan is to make automated backups on linux and windows, that put the win32 and the linux executable on the CDR so I can be assured of being able to read it anywhere.
That said, I have some questions of my own for you windows weinies.
1) How do you download windows updates into some kind of file that you can put on a CD and use to update a computer that has no internet connection or is on a modem or so virused it crashes by itself after 10 minutes of thrashing on each bootup ? When I go to windowsupdate.com, it notices that I visiting it using Linux and refuses to help me at all.
2) Similarly, I want to download windows media player to put on the same non-connected machine. The windows site won't let me download anything, because again, it detects that I am visiting the site from Linux.
3) What's the best free software that will scan a machine and clean off all the viruses without de-configuring the sound card, returning the video to 640x480, etc ?
I've used http://www.handybackup.com/ for several clients and have been very pleased with the results thus far. It allows you to backup to cd-r, network, or ftp and allows the backup to be scheduled in a wide variety of ways.
I wrote a perl script to do it all for me, then didnt use it for a couple months, fell hundreds of gigabytes behind, and gave up again.
Now waiting for somebody to make a consumer-level WORM drive designed for constant use- 99% of my data I never change, I suspect it's true for most people (You needed all that space to install [insert product] and the files it creates are < 10MB.. what WORM options are there? I mean, other than two DVD-R drives and a robotic 200-disc changer.. right now it seems much cheaper (*factoring in Time, which as we know == money) to buy R/W drives and get a couple new ones whenever a single high-end(consumer) unit can hold half to all of what the previous drives have. (it's been working so far)
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I'm not talking about the fact that the majority of your post is one long mental diarhea of a run-on sentence. Haven't you noticed that actual harddrives are far cheaper per GB than any WORM device will ever be ?
http://www.handybackup.com/
I set it up for some friends and it's worked well. Scheduling, automatic backups, backups to just about anything (CD/DVD/FTP/filesystem location), multivolume backups. Cheap, too.
He knows all and speaks in a way that doesn't make thier eyes gloss over.
quis fimum scribit?
You know, a good DVD burner is like $50, and an excellent 16x DVD burner is like $75 (NEC 3500).
Why use CDR at all? There's not space on those things. DVD-R is cheap. DVD+RW is like a hard drive. You can backup, then add more later. Then erase the thing and start over.
Although we use it to backup files to a networked PC,not to CDR, we have been very happy with Second Copy.
It's affordable at $29.95 for one user, with bulk pricing for multiuser environments.
It's easy to use, will backup or synchronize files or directories, and works well over a network. And yes, it will back up to CDR. Right now we use it to backup and or sync five systems. Run it once daily and Bob's Yer Uncle.
Three Squirrels
I normally use Retrospect Express for desktop backups.
Burns to CDR, fast, super-easy to use, and has some excellent scheduling features.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
In my windows boxes, I use a freeware program called DFIncBackup. Does full, incremental, etc... to any media (including network shares, DVD, CDR, etc...). You can also indicate file extensions to backup, or ignore, split large archives, backup to zip file, create templates, etc... Probably one of the best in freeware (and shareware and pay). I've had to restore only once, and it worked flawlessly.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Dantz Retrospect has a good UI, should be fairly easy for somewhat savvy users.
Buy a couple of 60 GB drives and removable trays.
Done.
-- $G
The simplest, non-incremental solution, is to boot some form of Linux. I chose RIP last time I had to do this. I don't remember if it had cdrecord, but it had reiser4, captive-ntfs, and loaded everything into RAM on boot (fairly quickly) so that you could eject the disk. The script, though ugly, can be understood well enough to set up your own backup script which runs each boot.
... | split ...", have the fifo's catch the files, and "cat" them into cdrecord. To join them back together, you recreate the same fifos, do "cat fifo1 fifo2 fifo3... | tar -xjp...", pop the CDs in one at a time, and dd (or cat) the CD device, piped into the fifos.
As for the backup itself, I just used tar, piped the compressed version straight into cdrecord, using stdin and a huge buffer. When I needed to back up something bigger than one cd, it was a disk image, so it was easy enough to just pipe 'dd' from certain offsets into cdrecord, and write the offset on the physical disk label (with a Sharpie).
There's a program called "split" which might help if you need to split one tar across multiple cds. Again, to avoid having to deal with Captive slowness, I can do this all in RAM. The trick is to set up some fifos, run "tar
Unfortunately, it might take some use of Perl and Captive-NTFS for me to make it incremental (only backup changes). But I've never actually wanted to do that -- this is usually for when I'm stranded without networking or Internet.
When I do have Internet, I have a dedicated backup server, which I backup to with either some simple rsync scripts or BackupPC. BackupPC is very, very close to being able to do fully incremental backups forever, and purging the oldest ones when it runs out of space. Furthermore, it can use many, many ways of backing up. My favorites are rsync over ssh for unix boxes and samba for Windows boxes.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
What about easy[1] automatic[2] incremental DVD-R backups under Linux?
WTF[3]?
[1] Easy, as in I don't need to learn C++, Python, PHP, Perl, or set up MySQL
[2] Automatic, as in, spit "Please insert a disk for the daily incremental" onto the console, wait indefinately for that to happen (as signified by the insertion of a blank DVD), and then reliably make and verify said incremental backup
[3] Aren't we in 2004 yet? ISTR better backup solutions in the 80s.
This might end up lost in oblivion since I'm posting as AC, but just in case...
I run several PCs, older ones of which were basically free because they use cast-off hardware from when I upgraded my main PC.
Then, HD space is about the cheapest backup you can get. I use rdist to sync things between several PCs, which act as mutual live backups to each other.
It generally works very well: the chance if all HDs failing at once is really small. On the other hand, you do also have disadvantages compared to CD or DVD backups. For one, you don't get geographical dispersal, so a fire or other calamity can take out all your data at once.
Still, you sure as hell can't beat the sheer convenience of it. And there's no "restore" per se to worry about. If one machine dies, I just move to another until I get a replacement HD for the first one. Reinstall Linux, re-rdist, and I'm good to go.
For archival backups on long term media, I'd stick with some standard format such as tar files. I wouldn't trust that I could read some proprietary backup format in the future. I have tarballs I've made on a VAX 11/780 in 1982 which I can still read today. Longevity of your backup format matters almost more than the physical media does, IMHO.
I use Carbon Copy Cloner on my PowerBook to mirror my entire hard drive to an external 60 GB USB 2.0 hard drive. CCC is supposed to make external drives bootable as well, but I've had trouble getting it to do that.
It's not the ideal solution, since it obviously means that if any data on my PowerBook's HD gets corrupted, I'll just be cloning over that corruption. I'm probably going to start doing separate backups to CD-R and/or CD-RW to ensure additional data integrity. But I do like the simplicity of having a complete mirror of my PowerBook's HD on another HD if the drive in my PowerBook should ever fail -- restoration will be that much easier.
I love my Iomega Rev! [insert clicking sound here :P ]
No seriusly I havnt had a single problem with it. and the filesystem is the open starndard and avalible to windows mac and linux alike UDF filesystem.
Seriously, there's got to be decent backup software for Windows, especially considering how many corporate environments it's used in. It's a pretty common and critical piece of software.
On the Mac there's Retrospect among others. Toast will also do incremental backups to CD. Also, it's not hard to do a search for all documents modified after some date and back them up if you really want to do it that way. On the Mac, it'd be pretty easy to encapsulate in an AppleScript, although I realize it's not everyone's cup of tea.
Hey, you could also use a combination of the Unix find command combined with ditto, pax & bzip2.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
I have a task-scheduled Windows Scripting Host script that runs NTBackup, zips it, defrags it, tests the zip, then exports the registry and does the same to that. It does this early in the morning just after the PC turns itself on, while I'm not using it.
It finally takes an sha1 of the job lot, and I then fire up Easy CD Creator and burn the lot to CD, finally verifying the sha1 sum.
I've been thinking about getting a few USB 2 external hard drive enclosures and using them.
But for the moment I have plenty of space left on a 700MB CD-RW and it doesn't take too long to burn, I'm usually eating breakfast once I've set it going anyway.
I take disk images using PowerQuest DriveImage 7 and once a week or so copy them plus all my MP3s, downloads etc. onto a removable hard disk which uses an internal 5 1/4" removable tray. Not quite as nifty as a USB enc would be, as you have to power the machine off first. But at least that way I've got 160GB of fast(er) storage when I need it.
I'm sure for a home-user environment where they're not tech savvy you could do the above but onto a USB hard drive and have them unplug it after it's backed up and keep it safe.
HTH
Insert DVD #1 of N, boot machine.
Enter some basic info
Confirm full restore
Swap disks as needed
Reboot
None of this: install XP, then SP1, then drivers for your video card, then IE 6.1.666, then your backup/restore sw, then restore overwriting the Registry, reboot, blue screen, reboot in safe mode, reboot again, done.
I just moved an XP install from 1 disk to another using this hideous, kludgy method.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
For full image backups, try Acronis. Symantec learned customer care from Microsoft, it appears.
With Acronis, you can make a full system drive backup of Windows XP while Windows is running.
Last time I checked, Ghost was VERY quirky.
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U.S. Gov.: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion.
The principle behind it is that it backs up entire partitions so that they can be reconstituted bit-for-bit as they were when the backup was made. Since version 7, there has been an option to do incremental backups. The compression ratio is wonderful. I have a 2GB partition with Windows XP and all the Windows programs that I use, and the image file that TrueImage makes of it fits on a 700MB CD! What's more, you can burn a recovery CD that boots directly (TrueImage is based on Linux) and has full backup/restore functionality. Oh, and in Windows you can "mount" the backed-up partition images so that they appear as a read-only drive with its own letter--in case you just need to recover a couple of files from a backup and not the whole thing. Really, I don't know what they'll do for 8.0, because I think 7.0 is just about the perfect backup program, and it's so easy that even a lazy guy like me has developed good habits about backups.
If CDBurnerXP supports backing up yet, but I think we can expect it to be in future versions of the software. It's a good free alternative to Nero and the developers are pretty responsive to new feature requests so it's worth keeping in mind.
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You need another HDD or a fileserver (with network).
;) ).
//fileserver/backup /mnt/test
/dev/hdc /mnt/test (if have another hdd).
/mnt/test/20041010
/mnt/test/20041010/machinename-hda-lzo-
/mnt/test/20041010/machinename-hda-lzo-* | lzop -d > /dev/hda
Assuming you want to backup first ata hdd on target system.
Boot Knoppix on system to be backed up-
Use:
knoppix 2 noswap
or
knoppix noswap
(latter if you have enough ram + cpu and you still want to browse the web etc whilst backing up
Then mount the drive/share you want to put the backups to.
e.g. mount -t smbfs -o username=blah
or mount
mkdir
dd if=/dev/hda bs=131072 | lzop -c | split -b 650m -
This creates files that are 650MB in size. You can burn these to CD-Rs. I prefer to leave a bit of unused space at the CD-R's edge (some seem to peel off there).
Note: that there are reports that dd in linux in some cases doesn't copy the last byte.
Also you may have to manually turn on DMA access on the HDD using hdparm, for speed.
To restore you do a similar thing - boot knoppix.
then mount the restore drive/fileserver (readonly if paranoid).
Then:
cat
I'm not 100% sure of the command-line parameters. But that's the general principle. I have successfully backed up and restored a number of images this way.
I use lzop because it is faster than gzip - with lzop I can get an average of 30MB/sec with an Athlon 2000XP - not far from max HDD transfer rate, for not much worse compression ratio. gzip is 2 to 3 times slower. Unfortunately lzop seems to be giving me an error in Knoppix 3.6 when I try to decompress. I'm mainly using Knoppix 3.3 though.
Don't forget: CD-Rs can be flaky backup media. Assuming a 40GB HDD compresses to 15-20GB, you'll need about 25 CD-Rs. If any of these don't work you can't restore successfully. So you may need to double the number for redundancy. That is a lot of trouble.
I actually suggest buying a few spare big HDDs and backup to them.
Per GB they're not much more expensive than CD-Rs.
100-200GB drives are about twice the price per GB compared to CD-Rs, and probably less flaky, problematic and troublesome for long term storage (plus take up less space than 150-300 CD-Rs). Just don't drop them and keep them in a safe dry + cool place (packed with dehumidifiers), e.g. data-grade fireproof safe. Buy multiple different brands of HDDs if you're paranoid.
It's a nice multi platform piece of software created by a company called SysV from Australia.
It does backup based on md5 checksums, backing up only what has really changed.
We even use it to do internet backup (sorry, it's Dutch).
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I noticed the Peter's Backup project on SourceForge. It looks like it has most of the features requested. I haven't tried it yet, but I think I will.
What happens if something like a hurricane destroys all your computers at once? (Realistically, you would need to ask yourself the same question if you used CD-Rs or tapes - if something wipes out your home/office, those backups are likely to be gone too.) There is also an option to backup to an off-site server. The server software is plain old PHP and should run on most commodity $3/month web hosting services, making for a relatively cheap, do-it-yourself backup. I haven't decided yet whether to just offer a (paid) monthly service myself or to release the PHP code so that people can set up their own servers. I'm open to feedback. The local P2P backup will remain free for the first version, in any case.
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
I've been using simplebackup for a few months now. It's the best free (libre & gratis) solution I've found.
It allows you to backup certain directories, ignore others, archive incrementally, differentially or completely in any one of a number of formats (zip, tar.gz, tar, rar of the top of my head). It also has volume spanning.
Downside - you do have to edit a text config file (so it's not for you average windows user), but it's fairly trivial to set up a few batch files ("back up my pictures now!", "back up my documents now!") etc.
It's written in perl, so you'll need to have active perl installed on windows, but it also works nicely on linux and osx (although you may want to use one of those tars which can deal with the resource forks mentioned earlier in the thread).
henry -- the human evolution news relay
I use a secure disk program (Bestcrypt, for Windows and Linux) to create mountable, secured virtual drives. I make each disk just under the limit for the burnable media, I bought a DVD burner, and given the limits of the DVD format the largest single file is 3.99 GB. I have two main virtual disks I use, one I mount every time I use the system (for desktop, email, favorites, etc.), the other is for things I use far less often (photos, archived projects, etc.). And every week (at least) I burn the main disk to DVD (less often for the other disk). Before I had a DVD drive I did the same thing with containers that were only 650MB).
I use a separate backup script to backup all the non-unique data (programs, system, etc.) to another hard drive.
(I've had a laptop stolen from my house years ago by burglars who broke in, and with the personal files, banking info, etc. that one keeps on their PC these days, security can't be ignored.) quincy
Don't vote for Eugene Papansanovich for Congress!
Acronis works perfectly when making backups from inside Windows XP. I've used it with several different motherboards (about 8 different kinds).
I don't have time to discuss the quirkiness of Ghost. However, the quirkiness was verified by Symantec technical support. I was told that many other people had discussed the same issues. If you know Ghost already, it is probably easy. I found reading the disorganized Ghost manual quite time-consuming. I find Symantec technical support very abusive and ignorant.
Acronis is very easy to use. Acronis uses a safe method of backing up, it just makes a sector backup of any file that is changed during the hard drive backup, so the backup you get is the hard drive when you started the backup.
Note that PowerQuest DriveImage is now owned by Symantec.
This method would only work if you use FAT* filesystem for windows, which I do even for Windows XP on my laptop, solely due to this reason.
Have Linux in your PC, and enough partition space to back up windows directories (200MB for windows 9x, and 800MB for XP). Boot to linux, then gzip and tar the whole windows directory, Doc*, and Programs*. Burn it to cd-r from linux.
I don't backup applications, since I only have a few to back up anyway, in a different partition, and nothing critical (some games and educational sw). There is minimal number of sw, and no network-related software, which also reduces headaches with maintenance.
Windows then can fit in one cd-r.
I had to restore Windows couple of times, and it always worked. The application partition never crashed, and I wouldn't have spent much time re-installing a few applications anyway. It was always the configuration settings and updates in the OS that took so much time.
Again, this only works if your hardware doesn't change much and you don't install new software that frequently.
I use Appleskript to create Compressed Diskimages that are then transferred to my iPod. One Klick is enough. I don't have to worry about filesize or resource forks.
Then I back the full up to CD-R on Sunday using another script, which also runs as a cron job (you just have to remember to load the CD before you go home for the weekend!):
Good Luck! Andy
In Soviet Russia, the signature reads YOU!
For Linux, though apparently not yet for Windows and MacOS X, there is the Eternal archival system. See http://www.parvat.com/index.php?PAGE=products/eter nal/home.php and
http://linux-bangalore.org/2003/schedules/talkdeta ils.php?talkcode=C403.
http://www.partimage.org
It'll backup across a network or to pretty much whatever you want. Also you can make a boot disk and use it to back up a non-Linux OS.
I have both Windows and Linux desktops at home, and I never backup anything. The way I figure it, all the software on my Windows box came on CDs, so I already have backup copies of everything I paid for, and I don't have reams of data just lying around on my HD that I need to backup. If it weren't for the occasional crash, I'd probably never reinstall my PC, so my Athlon XP 2800+ would run like a 486/66. Linux changes so much and so often, you pretty much have to reinstall twice a year anyway, if you want to stay current, so I don't see an issue there either... and of course, all PC hardware is obsolete after 18 months, so reinstalling periodically is inevitable. (Sarcasm mode off)
XXCOPY Haven't personally used it to backup onto DVD or CDR's before, but have heard of it being done successfully/easily by others.
Incredibly versatile tool. For my system backup I just use XXCOPY to clone my whole 'doze drive onto a spare HD loaded in a removable drive tray. When done, I have a complete, bootable backup sitting on the shelf for the next all-too-frequent catastrophe.
Oh yah, and it's free.
o 1 Sig beneath your current threshold
Is the king of the hill...
backup entire disk/partitions to bootable cd's or dvd's that are a breeze to restore.
But, there is another point, too. MS has long offered backup software with its OS. Allowing that software to back up to another device does not add another piece of bundled software; it improves the functionality of the software already on the computer. Comparing this added functionality of an already existing piece of software to the browser MS bundled with its OS is like comparing apples and oranges.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
Honestly I can't stress how much I value my external harddrive. I have a laptop, and beyond addition storage, I use the HD for a good deal of backups.
Sure it's more expensive than CD-Rs, but you get a ton more storage, and a heck of a lot faster (not to mention the added space if you want it), and you can get some great deals (I got an enclosure and 120GB for $90) on USB2 or firewire external drives from http://www.pricewatch.com/ (just be sure you are buying the combo and not just an enclosure).
With this kind of space and speed, you can zip or rar files and folders and copy them over. More importantly, you can easily image a drive using one of the utilities already mentioned, and not have to worry nearly as much about fitting it onto 700 or 650 MB.
And with HDs going for about $1 a GB I would also suggest not quickly running to CD, perhaps just by a second internal drive.
OK, so you need enough disk space for another copy of what you're writing, but you should have 650Mb free (assuming we're primarily talking CDRs rather than DVDRs).
That's what the MS site says, too (albeit not very clearly).