Slashdot Mirror
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.
Maybe I'm wrong on this one, but it seems to me like the resource fork is on the way out. How many of your applications/files actually use the resource fork in OS X?
The primary exception seems to be OS 9 stuff.
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.
Ghost is excellent for full image backups, I use it to backup to a spare hard disk and dvd and the images are browsable if you need to restore individual files.
If you have a network or just a pc and a laptop you can easily backup over the network to any pc.
I back up my system and data partitions only, I keep all my mp3's and images on a third partition and archive those seperately.
Apart from that I have a 1gig thumb drive that I regularly copy my main documents to.
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.