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Backups to CD-R?

Posted by Cliff on from the anything-but-tape dept.

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?"

3 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Could be worse by skinfitz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:you know by cgenman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Probably because Windows XP's inherent burning system isn't as well hooked into the OS as HDD-based removable media. They just got the whole CD-as-floppy paradigm with XP, and it doesn't exactly work right yet. Go ahead, try to save this page to your CDR drive.

    Didn't work, did it? Explorer is doing all kinds of fancy footwork to make it appear as if you're copying files onto the drive, then burning them, when under the hood you're just copying to a local cache on drive C.

    Essentially, their CDR implementation is incomplete, and therefore it would be a pain to implement full backup to it. Add to that file splitting and management, and why not just hold off on that feature until Longhorn.

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  3. Try Acronis. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 3, Insightful


    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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