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It's 2006 and Backups For Home User Still Tricky?
CranberryKing asks: "What is it about backups that always seems so difficult? I am trying to do a simple backup on my home XP system/s (about 30GB of files) that will write to my DVD burner. I don't want compression (most of it is MP3s, which don't compress well). I want a routine to simply write my selection to the DVD writer and spread it across however many discs are required (rather than me manually approximating and copying to each disc). I want the files on the disc readable from any system, so no proprietary backup wrapper or DAT files, please. My last attempt was using a free program that looked good called Simply Safe Backup, but it created two coasters before crashing with an unknown error. If I can just get a full backup to work smoothly, then I'll worry about scheduling, incremental, and encryption. This seems like a very common scenario for home & small offices. Is there an elegant, reliable & cheap (free) solution to this?"
Backups for the home or small business user do not need to be tricky, difficult, inconvenient or time consuming. But you do need to have the right equipment and software for the job.
I would say that the method that you chose, which is using a DVD-Writer drive, is not the best solution to your problem. I have found a product that does work well, and that is the Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive solution. I have one of the newer models, the Maxtor OneTouch II and with the bundled Dantz Restrospect software, it works great. You can schedule the hard drive backup at a certain time or (and this is where the OneTouch gets its name) you can hook up the external hard drive anytime and press the button on the front, and the software will take care of the rest of the backup procedure. It is quite easy and even users who have in the past been put off by other backup solutions (like backup tapes and recordable CDs) have embraced it. You can add other features like incremental backups easily as well through the software as well, and it stores the files in the Maxtor OneTouch drive in a regular file system, so it can be accessed even on machines without the Dantz Retrospect software loaded.
The issue I have found is that for most home or small business users, if the backup procedure is tedious or cumbersome, the user will not do the backups and data loss will occur. After using this device and recommending it to others, I have found it has gone a long way to solve this problem... it's truly a twenty-first century method of system backup.
The last Maxtor OneTouch II I bought was under $200 Canadian and had a 100GB capacity and includes all the software and cables that you need to get connected and working right away.
P.S. I do not work for Maxtor or Dantz, but I am a happy customer and I have sold this device to others in the past.
These are the good old days you'll be telling your children about. Make them worthwhile.
What is a good system to automatically backup (using ssh/rdiff-backup as the underlying tools, perhaps?) a Windows PC to an internet server hard drive? The client-side should have a nice GUI that can schedule backups. The server side should be a Linux RPM that can easily be installed, and run out of the box with a very simple conf file to set username/password hash/directory. The system should backup snapshots so that it can restore to any point.
Surely this need is common enough that an easy-to-use FOSS solution is out there!
Read my blog: HansMast.com
What you seem to want is a full disk copy, not necessarily a backup.
You don't want compression. You don't want everything packed together. You want all the files and directory structure to be preserved as-is.
That's a copy, not a backup.
Try Ghost or something from Partition Magic, if you've got the money. Otherwise, buy a separate HDD and just periodically run a script that recursively copies all files on one drive to the other.
"I want a routine to simply write my selection to the DVD writer and spread it across however many discs are required"
A 250 gig hard disk is under $100.00. How long are you going to take to back up 250 gigs to dvds (It takes time. I did it once - never again).
I use it and it's prevented some real heartaches caused by deleted/corrupt files.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
But to the point, Backup lets you create plans based on what to back up, where to back it up to and how often. Then it pops up a window when automatic backups are going to start telling you that one is going to begin and do you want to cancel. I think it's great and 9/10 of the time I never have to think about it.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
My Linux systems all backup to each other and external media with no trouble. Perhaps the problem is that you're using XP. Sorry, but it's a nice little reality that *nix systems are easier to backup despite a less frequent need to use backups.
-Tim Louden
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=mywindowspartition.image
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)
Make a splitted .rar (you don't have to compress - simply choose "store") and spread it over several dvd's.
:-)
Maybe not the most elegant solution, but it work's - until you run out of dvd's
Step 1. Install Ubuntu on a PC
Step 2. Install Backup PC from synaptic package manager
Step 3. There is no step 3!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If it's mostly mp3s, then try organising them in iTunes. If you select your whole library, and tell it to burn a data CD or DVD, and it doesn't all fit on one, then it will keep prompting you for additional media until it's all burnt.
;-)
Otherwise, as another poster has suggested.. you could get a real OS. (or install cygwin
Sorry, we neither endorse nor use Windows XP Home. Our backups use rsync. You might want to try asking on www.noobhelp.com.
"I am trying to do a simple backup on my home XP system/s"
Patient to Doctor: It hurts every time I do this."
Doctor to Patient: Stop doing that.
DRM.
Oh, wait...
No offense, but... if you have no intention of providing an answer to the OP why are you wasting his time?
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.ht ml
not for Windows, but arguably (will soon be) the greatest step forward for "home user" backups.
It's 2006 and Backups For Home User Still Tricky? - What is it about backups that always seems so difficult?
Well, your first misstep there is assuming that your experience is indicative of the average home user. I can tell you that your average home user doesn't really have more than 4.7 gigs of critical data that they would be interested in backing up.
(The ones that do, just back up the less important stuff to an external drive. At leastr that's usually what I recommend)
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
He was asking about XP.
You mispelled "I don't know."
Mac OS X comes with Disk Utility. Using that, and Automator, you can set up a script to image your drive to a bootable drive image every night.
Problem solved.
The real litigious bastards...
nobody here has any clue so far what to tell you, so instead keeping schtum they offer solutions that don't include using the dvd burner....i just don't really trust hard drives as a backup medium myself (i'm sure many people here will tell you why i'm wrong) simply because a dvd/cd you can leave it in the case for three years and if it hasn't been used then it will work fine first time. external hard drives that have more than one backup will degrade over time, and it will go eventually without warning (maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but...you get it) leaving you up shit creek. to be honest i think you are just going to have to back them up manually my friend. smart alecky as i am i don't know of any solutions either. it is early on during the thread though, so good luck.
and please everyone, don't tell him to use linux (no flames please, i'm on debian now as we speak) i'm sure he's heard it many times if he's been here a while. anyway as i said, good luck
I know that Carbon Copy Cloner is very highly rated. However, in my first attempt, it failed to complete the job--I'm apparently a rare case. However, that led me to the most excellent of excellence, SuperDuper!. Except for the ! in its name, this is first-class stuff and supported by a guy who makes money so that you are less likely to be left in the lurch as I've heard some complain lately with respect to CCC.
And it works out of the box without any muss or fuss and is a LOT faster than writing DVDs. That's if you simply want to copy data from point A to point B.
For my Windows XP laptop, I actually use Ghost. If I need to, I can boot off the Ghost CD and restore my laptop from the last recovery point which is automatically done every morning to a USB 80gig hard disk. That 80gig disk is actually the old hard drive from the laptop. I'd replaced it with a 7200rpm drive to improve speed a bit and got an external enclosure for the old drive for about US$20.
You could do the same on a Linux box with a simple script and a rescue CD.
Cheers,
elegant, reliable & cheap (free)
You aren't going to get all three in one package. Nope, no way.
You should check out DAR. It does exactly what you want. It's free under the GPL.
It's command line based and you will need to read the documentation before using it, but it does what you want.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/backup/8.30.2006 done! oh wait... heh
Restorable images are not the basic files readable on any system.
On topic, I find that a simple external hard drive and Rapid Backup (under Other Software -> Retired) works perfectly fine for myself and quite a few other people that I've set it up for. Yes, as it states on the page it is technically unfinished software, and you do need to apply a patch that the author has provided, but the software does work quite well and includes a scheduler.
I don't understand why so many home users are against using a good, old fashioned tape backup. Look, you can get a DDS-4 tape drive from eBay for less than $100. In fact, I'm about to sell my Sun external DDS-4 drive there soon. You can then get a compatible SCSI card for about $20 if not less. Then you just have to get the tapes. A new box of ten DDS-4 tapes -- equivalent to about 480GB compressed -- can be found for around $50 on eBay.
... whoops), I use a six-month rotation.
Because Windows Backup recognizes most tape drives, you can always use that to do you full and incremental backups. It's certainly not going to be anywhere close to something like Veritas NetBackup, but it still allows media management, is compatible from system to system (as long as it's the same version of Windows or newer), and you don't really need to do anything. Mark what you want to backup, make sure the tape is in the drive and ready to go, then back the stuff up. If you have a completelsystem crash, Backup can read the contents of the tape and rebuild the index.
I know, I know, the Slashdot crowd doesn't seem to like tapes. Whatever. They work fine for me. I use a three month rotation with a full backup at the beginning of every month and incrementals every Sunday. For the infrequently-changed directories (almost called them file systems
And don't complain about the slow speed of tape drives because that's what overnight backups are for. Let the system back up your files while you're asleep. Besides, DDS-4 goes at about 15-20GB/hour. Even if you just need to go out and run some errands, you can set it to backup as you're about to walk out the door.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Try www.backup4all.com - it will do various types of backups, but specific to your problem it'll do a copy backup and spread it across however much media it needs. It will even backup open files using the shadow copy facility built into XP.
Chances are even a generic OEM DVD Writer comes with write software that is able to do the simple backups you are requesting. (Although I am with many users, just add a new hard drive for backups, even a USB external is going to be about 50-100 bucks and will be virtually instant in comparison to DVD and just as reliable if not more.)
WindowsXP pre-dates DVD Writing as the norm of the time (2001), so it doesn't inherently support it (which draws out the OSX and Linux crowds of telling you to get a real OS and then they list 20 command line tools that are fairly cumbersome.)
Since it appears you are using Windows, when you can, move to Vista, Backups are easy, able to use DVDs, and can do full system bit by bit as well as file/folder backups, all with a couple of clicks.
Like others have already said, backing up to optical media is a pain.. Like seriously 4 gig discs? Ugh.. Painful.
Buy a 320gig HD (about $120cdn), pop it into an external enclosure (or not), and use something like: SyncExp (http://syncexp.com/). Pick your host and mirror drives, run it as often as you want manually or setup some automated crons. And yes, it's for windows.
Otherwise go nuts and setup a slave linux box with a redundant RAID5 array and setup cron jobs there to backup all your critical data every 5 minutes if you wish.
R4NT.com - A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
[kburn]No offense, but go shoot yourself.[/kburn]
It just works. We deploy it on all our computers. Copy to a Samba share, then copy to an external hard drive.
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/tar.htm
The _easiest_ way I can think of to do this without either spending a lot of money or switching operating systems, is probably just get an archiver, possibly http://www.rarlab.com/ winrar, and on the create archive screen, select to only store the data (no compression, runs faster and mp3's are already compressed anyway, why compress them again?), and tell it to split the archives into whatever size you want (depending on what kind of dvd's you use. single or double layer, etc, just input the number of bytes and it'll auto-split them into appropriate segments). Then just burn the archives to disc one at a time, which is a bit time consuming but by no means difficult to do.
This isn't the prettiest solution in the world, and it can't save a lot of things (like all your settings and such) but it works for personal files quite well. And you just need the appropriate unarchive program installed after you reinstall, so either winrar for windows, or unrar for *nix, should you ever decide to cross over. That is, assuming you choose the rar format. IMHO, as far as the windows-friendly archives go, it seems to work the best out of the common formats for this sort of backup work.
uh
21,240 Floppy Disks
either way you try it once and then ....Never Again!
you are using the wrong media for your "EZ BACKUP"
as others have pointed out, use an External HD with something like Retrospect installed.
Push a Button, you're done.
I like microcars
I don't use Windows, but for my friends (the ones who can actually be made to care about backups), I recommend this:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~edienske/abakt/
Support both 'traditional' (compress/split) type backups and a file copy method (good for a USB hard drive, for less savvy users who want to be able to just plug the thing in and retrieve the file they just borked).
Open source. Feel the love.
Not the easiest thing to setup, so I set it up for them, save the profile, and tell them how to do a backup (plug in drive, start program, press go).
Command attempted to use minibuffer while in minibuffer
I find that most people get Nero along with their CD/DVD drive - the Nero BackitUp program can do exactly what you want - you can specify no compression if you like, and it will automatically shuffle everything to maximise your DVD use. I would have assumed that most modern CD/DVD writing packages would offer something similar.
How can data backup be difficult? External hard drives, Optic media, Flash media - how many options do we have? Lots. Don't make it more difficult than it has to be, or the Darwin award goes to you.
Hard drives are cheap.. setup a basic raid array and forget about it.. over long enough time it will even save you money (no dvd's to buy)
Get a cheap IDE hard drive and an external USB2.0 enclosure. Either copy the files, or if you want a restorable image, use Microsoft backup. It's easy. Seriously. It will do your whole system, a whole directory, whatever. Why would you want to waste time changing a bunch of DVDs when you can just plug in a USB hard drive and COPY THE FILES (or use a program that's pretty much on every version of Windows, or is easily copied once from the CD?)?
;)
Bring it to your buddie's house, no proprietary crap to deal with if you just copied the damn files. No compression, whatever. Shit, even use it on Linux!
I'm with most of you - I'd rather use dd or tar...but for Windows, MS Backup isn't bad - especially for a simple home backup.
P.S. BOBS backup rocks for Linux and remote backup...very simple, just could use some interface tweaks! Programmers, anyone?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Okay, my suggestion is probably dead because you want the data to be to be readable on other systems. I read that initially, but it just didn't click. (It's getting late here.) You should still consider this to be an option as well, even if you get an external hard drive. I've actually had Windows screw up (oh, there's a shock) and wipe an external hard drive on me because it thought that it was unformatted.
Take my advice on this -- NEVER format an external drive as "dynamic". ALWAYS make it "basic", otherwise it's the equivalent of a Veritas Volume Manager drive and is therefore NOT friendly to being moved from system to system.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
www.xdrive.com is your answer as far as backing up an XP machine goes.
RSync and/or Robocopy with external USB or eSATA drive.
Easy to get working, and the software is free (as in beer).
If you're really looking for data protection, RAID the external drives...
Backing-up to CD/DVD is too slow and time consuming for any system with appreciable amounts of data...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
My backup strategy is to hope that my hard drive doesn't fail before I get a new one. It has worked so far.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
I've got a 250GB external hard drive that I've partitioned in to 2 disks: one for games and other large files, and another -- Backup -- for a full copy of my main hard drive.
/usr/bin/rsync -E --stats -a --delete -x -S \ /afs/\* \ /cores/* \ /dev/\* \ /private/tmp/\* \ /private/var/run/\* \ /private/var/vm/* \ /tmp/* \ /var/spool/\* \ /Network/\* \ /automount/\* \ /private/var/spool/postfix/\* \ .Spotlight-*/ \
/Volumes/Backup/System/Library/CoreServices
Here's the terminal script that works the magic on MacOS X:
sudo time
--exclude
--exclude
--exclude
--exclude
--exclude
--exclude
--exclude
--exclude
--exclude
--exclude
--exclude */Caches/Safari/\* \
--exclude
--exclude */.Trash \
--exclude
"/Volumes/Macintosh HD/" \
"/Volumes/Backup/"
sudo bless -folder
Now whenever I want to run a backup, I run this shell script and it's all done in about an hour.
I hope this is useful to someone!
E-sata, usb, and firewire cases let you use the drive on a lots of differnt type of systemso sure-case-external.html
this one work with sata dirves and it has a OXFORD 924 chip set
http://www.cooldrives.com/esata-firewire-800-encl
also firewire 400 is faster then usb 2.0 as it has less cpu over head.
Here is my batch (simplified):
xcopy /C /H /E /R /Y "%USERPROFILE%\My Documents\*" D:\storage\backup /M /* /s /q D:\storage\backup
C:\bin\mkisofs.exe -v -J -R -l -o D:\storage\DVDRW.iso D:\storage\backup
C:\bin\DVDburn.exe f: D:\storage\DVDRW.iso
C:\bin\diruse f:\
rd
setup an IDE raid mirror and use those swappable bays... buy a 3rd drive and every other day let it rebuild from the mirror
If this post has multiple meanings, and one of those pisses you off, I meant the other one.
Straying off-topic a bit I suppose, but with hard disks so cheap I decided to just put two 320 GB drives in a RAID-1 array (which my Asus A8V mobo happens to support). Now I don't bother routinely backing up the data (photos, MP3s, "My Documents" folder, etc.) that I store on these drives. (However, I do burn my most recent photos to DVD-ROM every six months or so; I make two sets of DVDs and store one off-site.)
What do you guys think of a RAID setup as an alternative to explicitly backing up files for a home user?
The road to hell is paved with Cat 5 cable.
Backups are "so complicated" not because there is any challenging thing about copying data from point A to point B, or journaling diffs, or whatnot.
Backups are complicated because no two person's backup needs are the same. Those backup systems that provide few options and just say "this is the way it is going to happen" do not satisfy enough people's needs to become very popular. Those that offer too many options are near impossible for the average joe to make heads or tails of.
If you tried to make a list of all the different basic backup philosphies people use in different situations, and on top of that, all the thousands of different tweaks and options and nuances piled on top of each of those, it gets quite daunting. The winner applications will be the ones that learn how to confine their scope just enough to capture a large market share, but still manage to be configurable enough to satisfy the power users in that segment, and finally and most importantly manage to supply sensible defaults and follow the "principle of least surprise." I think Bacula is among them, but that there will be another 3 or 4 for different "customer bases."
Someone had to do it.
I use Norton Ghost and an external USB drive. It backs up every little thing and puts my system right back to where it was at the time of backup, even if I have to replace the hard drive, or even the PC. It saved my ass and everyone at my company's ass multiple times. I'm still running the same "image" that I created on a PII in 1998. I never ever had to do a reinstall of everything.
Can't go wrong with BackupPC ( http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ ) It's a little involved to get it set up but seems to work well, especially for backing up multiple PC in the "home data center"
It isn't easy, but one day I think we will have a good database based file system. I don't think we need to throw away our good old directory based system for our system files and other static files, but I do think it'd be good for data and perhaps configs.
If you've used a major database you'll know they use a singular or multiple files which contain all of the data. The data is usually seperated into 2/4/8 kb pages depending on the system. When you do a backup the pages are copied into a backup file. The backup size is 8kb times the number of pages used roughly. When each page is backed up it is tagged as being so, this makes differentials a breeze. When a page is written to, the backup stamp is removed and then the backup software can just backup those pages to make a differential backup. Differentials grow with time, so you'll do full backups every week or so and then diffs each week.
Tag on a transaction log file and you can back it up at the end of the main backup and have real time backups.
I'd love to just save my mp3s, videos, and other static data files into a "repository" and just search for them as I needed them. One of the big challenges to me is re-writing all the apps out there to take advantage of such a system, especially with the classic file model being so engrained in the basics of most operating systems.
Windows has promised this for many years, but I'm guessing it will be a brand new kid on the block that will do that. Maybe if Google write an OS from scrath or something of that nature...pretty far fetch though.
As I was reading over this I got that idea that maybe we could do the same thing, but with our clusters on the harddrive. If HD manufacturs would add a little bit on the harddrive itself we might be a to do a block level differential.
Now that I have agreed with you about backing up being hard, I will tell you what I know. A guy in my lab said that there is a utility called Backup that ships with Windows XP Professional. I haven't used it, but he says that it works well enough for backing up files and even has an incremental feature. So, I would suggest looking into that utility.
Slightly off topic, but in line with some of the above posts, I would mention that there are very easy ways to synchronize the iTunes music folder between multiple machines running OS X (this works for other folders, but I use it for this and the OP mentioned music particularly). This makes a good backup and it syncs both ways. You just have to be careful to run it the right way if you use both machines.
copy music to the current machine:copy music to the other machine:
I use SystemRescueCd, freely available at http://www.sysresccd.org/ licensed under GPL 2. This is a linux boot CD with various utilities, including Partimage and some partition editors. Partimage is a Ghost/Drive-image clone for Linux. I boot with SystemRescueCd, and use Partimage to copy the partition to a file on a different drive.
I use EMC Retrospect to backup Windows XP and Mac OS X systems to DVD. It's easy to use and the price is reasonable. It doesn't meet all your requirements but I don't think you will find free software that does. The problem is that it takes a lot of work to write software that supports all or most of the backup devices on the market. In an ideal world, the operating system would have fully functional device drivers for tapes and CD/DVD burners. In the real world (Windows XP), these have to be written and supported by the people who write the backup software.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Say what you will about Microsoft, but Windows OneCare has a very painless backup process. It automatically backs up the "My Documents" folders on your PCs as well as settings and other such files, and allows you to specify any other folders you want.
It can then write directly to CD/DVD without the use of any additional software. I haven't tried to see if it will span multiple DVDs, but I assume it will.
And it kindly reminds you every X weeks to do the backup again. All-in-all it is a very simple, grandma friendly program that I have recommended to many home users.
Not to mention it comes with a decent anti-virus and anti-spyware which Microsoft assimilated, and can also run a regular "tune-up" as often as you want to defrag and delete old files.
Phone-based support is free for paying customers, and the person who answered when I called was on the phone in less than a minute and spoke perfect English. I even got a follow-up call two days later asking if the issue was resolved.
It's currently $20 for a 3-computer license (home or work) from Amazon.com. There is also a 90-day free trial from Microsoft's website.
-David
SizeMe is a very simple, free-as-in-beer GUI program for Windows. You drag'n'drop a mess of files into the window, and it rearranges them (but doesn't modify them) so that you can burn them to the minimum number of discs possible. It even lets you drag the images into Nero et al to burn them. Worth a look.
You don't need backups! Nothing to see here, move along.
Oh come on, your hard drive will never crash. Look at that thing? Sturdy, ain't it? It's built like a tank. They build them better and better every year, not like that old drive of yours that crashed in 1989.
Yeah, well your files aren't that important anyway. What, you're gonna miss some of that porn? Come on, you already have more than you could watch in a lifetime, why not just start fresh? Like you're ever gonna reread those old pathetic emails to your ex-girlfriend anyway. Give it up, man. You don't need backups.
My bicyles
I use Mozy. It's free, works well, does it's stuff in the background. They have paid options too for more space if you need it...cheap and easy and doesn't seem to get in my way.
I don't work for Mozy or know anything else about them; I was sent to the site and started using it and it seems to work.
From their site:
Mozy Plus
Got lots of stuff to backup? Mozy Plus lets you backup more of your photos, music files, and other important documents.
30GB - $4.95/month
Mozy Free
2 GB of 100% free backup space.
And the mozy whoring part:
Try it out
Mozy, free online backup service
--
We started using a Mirra box a year or so ago at work. It's a really really easy box to setup: plug in power, plug in network cable, turn on, put CD into the machine you want backed up, click next a bunch, magic. It's pretty cheap ($300?), has 150gb of space, automated, has version control, and you can access your backups from anywhere. It really is as easy as they say. We've been using with about 10 people in the office with no problems, http://www.mirra.com/. I think it also runs some form of Linux if you wanted to hook a keyboard up to it and see what's going on.
/d to this other drive. Works great for me!
However I don't want to chuck $300 for a home backup box, so what I do with my 30gig 'collection' of junk is run a script to another drive. I just have a big 'ole 120gig drive and everyday a batch file kicks off, xcopy
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise - William Shakespeare
... my flying car takes care of backing up my data.
I've been very happy with Cristalink's firestreamer product. It uses your DVD-RW to emulate an IBM 3480 tape drive which is supported by NTBackup. I have a set of RW disks. I use a batch file to identify if the media is changed. If it is changed, I do a full backup. If not, I do a differential backup. Recovery of files is super fast! Unlike a real tape drive, positioning to a file is almost instantaneous.
1. don't use DVD that's a waste... get an external hard drive - they're cheap, reliable and will be much faster to backup to and restore fromh otography/prophoto/synctoy.mspx They built it for digital photography backups, but it will copy any file. Very simply gui for syncing between 2 folders/drives or backing up (mirroring) folders/drives. You can even schedule it as a windows task.
2. Microsoft SyncToy. there's no reason to spend money on a one touch backup solution, when microsoft has the software to do easy backups for free. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalp
3. If SyncToy is too gui for you, then you can always download the server 2003 tools and use robocopy (it works on XP as well as server 2k3).
is one called cobian.... please google for cobian backup
it can do a lot of things, it is easy to configure.... i have setup several small offices, backing up to a central SMB or ftp server...
some of my relatives use this tool with an external hdd, cheaper and faster than dvd...
did i mention it can do differential, incremental, or full backups, and keep "n" old version..
it rocks... it is free
What, you don't want to shell out several thousand dollars for Netbackup and a tape library??? What's your problem!? (OK, so I'm a little biased... supporting Netbackup is what keeps a roof over my head).
The number 1 mistake people make when doing backups: They write far, far too much data to their tapes. If I had a nickle for every time I saw a user backing up their swap partition and wondering why they where running out of tapes... well, it'd maybe get me a free meal a month. At a fast food joint. From the dollar menu. I digress. Make sure all of that 30Gb is stuff you genuinely can't get anywhere else. Oh, and RAR works great with all those important documents.
Seriously, though. Why not use a tape drive? DDS tape drives sell for next to nothing on Ebay (my DDS-3 6 tape autochanger was less than $20). NTBackup is free and spans quite nicely. DDS4 tapes hold 20-30Gb of data and cost about the same as a high quality audio tape. Incidentally, Microsoft: Please modify NT backup to work with CD/DVD-RWs (or even DVD-RAMs). I wait for the feature with every new version of windows, it sounds like such a simple idea to me but they've never done it.
Small business:
Nero bundle a fairly decent backup product with their Burning ROM software. It's very reasonably priced. It comes free with many burners.
Backup Exec isn't much more expensive and works VERY well. Tapes only, though.
You're really, really cheap? Buy another hard drive and mirror your primary. 30Gb drives costs next to nothing.
USB hard drives are nice to backup a lot of stuff, but for longterm storage they don't make as much sense as DVD. DVD you can move offsite, whereas you don't want to give a copy of a hard drive to Grandma for safekeeping.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I also have a Maxtor external drive, and I'm not a big fan of the Retrospect Express HD software that came with it. It's REALLY slow to do anything - just starting it and getting to a screen that lets you do anything takes forever. Also, I've had it corrupt its archive files and have had to run it for ~ 12 hours to rebuild them. I also use the automated backup feature to back up every night, and it will fail for A WEEK before it tells me, and then it gives no reason why (the logs are unintelligible, and I'm no dummy).
.zip format, so I can open the archive with a wide range of programs. I also want it to TELL ME when it fails to run a backup, and TELL ME WHY!
I agree with the first poster. I want a backup program that backs up in
If all you need to do is dump 30 gigs of files to disc (that's only 8 discs!), you're going to spend more time finding and learning to use software than you would just by breaking the files up into disc-sized directories. I've managed backups on everything from individual workstations to massive datacenters, and for my home backups I still just dump stuff to DVDs and external hard discs manually - there just isn't any real need for software that does the job for small, irregular backup jobs.
Use Acronis' TrueImage Home ($50 at http://www.acronis.com/
I allocate a partition, named "X:" and schedule a 100% image of all other drives to that partition (you can also do it to another hard drive, even a USB-connected external drive). You can compress, or not, as you wish (I use their standard compression, and have it configured to be broken in to 700MB chunks, in case I need to move it to CDs.) My backup runs automatically, every Sunday, at 2:30 am.
Make an occasional copy of the entire backup to CD or DVDs (I often use Dual-Layer DVDs to get 9GB commpressed, or about 18GB of original content, per disk).
Now, getting to back: Run TrueImage, use the option to "Mount the backup." It loads up the entire backup as a new set of drives (say, S: is your C: drive, T: is you D:, etc.). You can map the copy on the the X: partition, or the one from your disks (although the latter will require some disk-shuffling if its' a big backup). Now copy from the backup to your active drives at will. Then "Unmount" the drive. No clumsy "Recovery" like conventional backup tools like the excrable "Backup MyPC."
Nope it's useful. I've set up dozens of these at client sites, and they love it. They're always backed up (say, daily), and they can make easy off-site copies (say, typically 2 DVD, or one Dual-Layer DVD) once a week.
Try it. You'll like it.
AccuBurn-R http://www.infinadyne.com/accuburn-r.html automatically splits up files in a disc layout so you do not manually have to do it yourself and makes it easy to create a multi disc archive. It can be setup to do automatic backups as well. It does not use any proprietary technology to make the spanned disc archive so any of the discs can be easily read and used on almost any computer without the other discs from the archive or any special software. More information on how the disc archives work can be found here http://www.infinadyne.com/accuburn-rtech.html It is not free but it is not too expensive either at $41.99. I do work for Infinadyne but I thought I would mention the product since it is the only burning software to my knowledge that makes it so easy to create a spanned disc archive.
One other thing I must say is that for large backups (> 25GB) I would highly recommend using external hard disks. Slap 2 500 GB drives into 2 external enclosures and rotate doing a full backup to them at least weekly and you should be fine for home backups. If a backup drive goes bad just replace it, if your main drives go bad replace them and restore from your latest backup. Using this system I highly doubt the average home user would ever have major data loss barring fire/flood/etc that takes out the persons home.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
Yea I'd say DVD backups are just not a good idea for a 30 gig job. DVD burners are just too likely to crash or create DVD with badsectors. If you span a job, like a zip or rar it will only take one scratched disk to cause the archvie to be potentially lost.
A 2nd hard drive is by far the cheapest and most reliable solution. It will also prove much faster to recover than waiting for 8 DVDs to unrar.
check out newegg.com they have 120 gig+ hdd for 60 dollars all day long. I wouldn't get the one touch solution unless you truly need something expensive and less reliable that a normal hard drive. If you have computers in multiple sites you want to backup a one touch is an ok solution though you can buy a hdd enclosure and a hdd for cheaper and have a more flexible solution.
The SATA drive bays that pull out and are supposedly hot swappable are nice. For about 50$ you can get one with a snappy LCD temp display on the front. These HDD enclosures come in USB, eSATA and fireware. USB is pretty damn slow for backups so I'd stay away from it. eSATA I supposed is the best solution, but it's unfortunately not entirely mature in my opinion.
Ntbackup is a great backup solution for backing up reasonable amounts of data to hdd or even tape. I find it very straightforward and easy to setup unlike Tapeware or Backup Exec which all seem to be written by people who think backup prorams should have lots of buttons and color coded graphs.
Ntbackup is also of course free. You should be able to download it or pull it off an XP disk. If you have XP home you will have to do this because it doesn't come installed (though it may be on the XP home disk).
It sounds like your backup scheme would be very simple so even a scheduled batch file would be perfect.
Other very easy options are syncronization programs like alwayssync, beinsync and FolderShare. FolderShare is an especially powerful program which allows you to share and syncronize your files easily even over the internet. However for large amounts of (pirated) data Foldershare is not suitable, but still a good program to keep in mind. Syncronization is very convenient but not quite as safe as a backup.
If for instance you had two computers you could have each computer sync it's important files to the other and have a very reliable and up-to-date backup ready to use. MP3's and most video are not worth the time to compress.
Command line programs are good for backup like the old pkzip DOS based compression. Combined with a scheduler and a batch file a simple command line compression or copy programs can do everything you need.
Possible the most reliable solution is just a batch file that uses the xcopy command to copy all your files from several locations to one. Ntbackup is nice because it generates errors in the event manager though personally I find cataloging to be a pain in the ass.
I think this is more due to a lack of decent backup software than anything else. Backups in windows always seem to be a pain.
I prefer backup by disk image. This is easier on the mac:
1) Plug in external firewire drive (or USB if you like)
2) User SuperDuper to do a differential backup clone my hard drive to the firewire drive.
Should my HD fail:
- I can boot off the external drive and use it exactly as if it were the internal one.
- I can clone the external drive back to the new laptop drive when I get it
Should the laptop die or be stolen
- I can obtain a new mac and immediately boot off the backup and work from there
- I can clone the image to the new drive when I have time.
On the windows cd, check D:\VALUEADD\MSFT\NTBACKUP In there is a program called NTBACKUP install it. then click the start menu. click run. type in ntbackup. a wizard will open. you can now create a backup of the whole drive. i would buy an external hdd.
Quick and Dirty:
You could probably perform the above from a Knopix CD and an external hard drive. K3b might even have multi-disk support but I have not looked for it.
Yes, I know you could just use the external hard drive to store the data. A fire wire drive is the easiest and fastest way to make a back up. Plug it in and use grsync. Sounds great, but it's not always the best idea.
Sometimes you have more data than you have hard drive or better use for the drive.
If you are paranoid, you need write once media. Any live and writable drive is going to get hosed if your little XP computer is 0wnzered by some dirt bag who wants to erase everything you have. In that case, you can say good bye to all the data on your network when they keylog your passwords, and on your external drive as soon as you plug it in. A nice touch would be a fake dialog for you that shows their progress in wiping your drive as if it were restoring.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
just plain rsync.
local to local or local to remote.
works well, its free and I believe its multiplatform.
copy disk to disk. tape is useless now - its too error prone compared to disks. disks are the new 'swappable carts'.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
http://www.acronis.com/
... setup a back up server and you can back up a networked computer while its still running, but its flexible enough to use for home user needs as well.
that's all you'll ever need
I usually use synctoy powertoy for windows xp to do the backing up for me. It can run in a variety of modes and is usually good enough for most backups. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalph otography/prophoto/synctoy.mspx
Get a second HDD. Internal or external. Add a "Scheduled Task" that will run "backup.bat" periodically. backup.bat needs one line for an xcopy:
/d /e /h /o
xcopy C:\ D:\
The first run will take a while, since it's copying everything. Subsequent runs will only copy what's been modified since the last backup. It really doesn't get much easier than that, if you ask me.
Who doesn't like free music?
All you're asking for is a copy, so get an external harddrive, and copy.
The only trick is that it's not that easy in windows because of the messed up file permissions... if a file is locked so it's non-copiable it'll hose the copy at that point, so some basic backup software is useful, basically all the WD & Maxtor external drives ship with what you're looking for.
And, since your summary didn't really tell us jack all about your system other than you have alot of MP3s (consider backing these up once, then excluding them from any other backup) you may need to stop certain services (particularly database services) so that you get a good copy.
And last things last, if you really do want to go to optical media for some reason, I know both Nero & IBMs RecordNow! software have data projects where you just add as many files as you want and it'll break it up appropriately for each disk... in fact, I'm pretty sure Window's backup does this by default too. Actually, what solutions did you try exactly?
for this solution, massive software isn't very viable for you. and, i usually take the approach of slicing my hard disks into partitions. of course...to me 30GB isn't much lol (i can say that now a days?), but when i make a primary for my OS and programs, and a slice for my data....redirect my default document structure in windows...and wola!! now you can worry about just maybe...making an image of your system partiton with something like Norton Ghost or whatever...and burn the raw data on the other partition containing all your music, documents, video, etc... to multisession disks, so you can readily access the data. and you can add to the disks as you see fit. the best way to go about your backups is to plan and picture how you want it to go first and foremost. but believe me you prolly don't need to go buy into 100 dollar software for your needs. now, if i worked for a large datacenter...lol then that's a whole different story. i don't think your trying to back up incremental daily and fulls once a week on terabytes of info...
"In the kingdom where everything dies, the sky is mortal."
Ok on the particular solution you're mentioning... tarballs could be your friend, you can create them with most any compression software, and most compression software understands disc spanning. Likewise, even more compression software can read tarballs, and you can grab individual files out of it. Tarballs are compressionless file archives, and therefore use little CPU to create - they are I/O bound, best situation you can get assuming your hard drive is an order of magnitude or so faster than the DVD burner...
Anyways, as others have pointed out, there are good solutions out there better than DVD. For instance, DVD isn't very useful for archiving high quality video. Nor is it that convenient for backing up program files - the largest of which can themselves be installed through multiple DVDs in some cases. Tape is good, a bit more expensive than DVD per media unit, but if you compare the math you'll see that it's quite a bit better per gigabyte, depending on your solution. You might complain that tape robots are too expensive, and you want a nice automated solution - and I'd agree, the prices on those things is outrageous... but its not going to be a more tedious process without one than swapping a dozen DVDs through your drive. Especially since most tape drives have higher write speeds than DVD burners... total throughput is hard to compare, because with a very fast DVD drive, the time to swap discs becomes a significant part of the cycle.
Hard drive solutions are also convenient, if error prone. Honestly, I'd rather invest in an array of inexpensive discs - seriously go for the 80 GB bottom market drives, build a RAID 5 array, acquire a cheap RAID card (Promise has a good one that can be had for about $20), and build yourself an array. You want redundancy, put more drives in it. Keep one or two spares on hand, and never have to worry about losing data while you're waiting for one to be shipped. I'll bet it'll be tons more reliable than a USB hard drive solution in the long run.
DVDs and tapes are both subject to long term storage problems, with long term storage problems - look up DVD rot, and tapes are subject to magnetic and cosmic ray damage in long term storage. Magnetic safes and faraday cages can help, but a bad tape solution can cause a failure rate close to 50% in some cases. No matter how resilient a hard drive solution you choose, it will have a life expentency measured in years, not decades.
Some say the long term solution is to continue reinvesting in your archives, upgrading the technology and transferring the data whenever required. That might in fact be the best solution - the only long term storage I would trust would be hermetically sealed optical media, and the best density I'm aware of there is HDMD at 1GB per disc - not exactly practical for an archival solution - though I must say I've put in comparable hours recording on MD as an audio technician and transferring tracks to and from my digital studio. A better solution if the budget is unlimited would be holographic media - these are almost universally caddied to protect the sensitive interference pattern, and available in insanely high densities. But this is supposed to be about the home user - expect a holographic media solution to cost more than a small car.
My suggestion throughout all this ramble? Use the RAID 5 array and backup sensitive data to something you can archive. Use tapes if you can, if not DVDs can do the job though it'll be tedious. Either way, get the right software to do the job, don't be squeamish if you have to use some compression, you'll generally still be I/O bound anyways so it won't chew your CPU up. Put the important stuff in a metal safe - offsite if you can arrange it - possibly with tiered backup - make two copies of your monthly fulls, ship one offsite, keep your weekly diffs in a safe, something of that nature. Use a rotating schedule of tapes and run the verifications - it's important to make sure your tapes aren't wearing out, that you can rely on them. Ditto with DVDs, take the extra time at burn time to verify them.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
I just use Backup for OS X. I guess it requires a .Mac account and a place to put the files. Has made backing up painless for me.
- Sighuh?
BackupPC works great and can grab anything via SMB (give it admin access and get the whole drive via the standard C$ admin share). Try it out.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Acronis True Image is the only program so far that doesn't suck at backups. I use it constantly to backup to a USB harddrive I bought at discount. Perfect. Takes just minutes thanks to incremental backups.
Disclaimer: I am an employee (albeit at a low level) of the company that makes this, but also a happy user.
http://www.connected.com/
They're releasing their home-use product within the next few weeks. It's going to be about $50 in stores, but it works great. You tell it what you want to back up, and it is encrypted and sent to a datacenter. You need to recover it, and you can either go to a website (if enabled), or just recover it via the tray application. It works really well, and is a small price to pay for off-site storage of your data.
I haven't used windows since 1994, but doesn't it come with some type of built in
scripting language to help the user automate stuff like this ?
Just write something that finds the files you want from a plain
text configuration file,
breaks the list into $DVD_SIZE chunks,
opens the DVD burning application of your choice,
passes it the list of files, and waits for a disc.
Burn the list of files, and which DVD they are contained on in a plain text file to the disc,
and also store it on your hard drive. When you need to recover a file, just check the list files to
see which disc it is on, insert that disc, and copy the file back where it goes.
MacOS practically writes these types of apps for the user, but MacOS has been updated since N64 was
the new gaming console, so it's not that surprising.
UN?X has a multitude of tools to make securing your data from hardware and user error a breeze.
If your OS doesn't help you keep your data safe, why are you using it ?
There only exists two types of computer users.
One of these has lost data, and the other will lose data.
I don't use tape because Windows backup has corrupted two different taped backups for me. CDs/DVDs are inconventient and a storage/handling nightmare. Like many others have suggested I went the external hard drive route. I run Windows Server for my fileserver though so can't use the Maxtor Onetouch software, instead I use a robocopy script I whipped up in about 5 minutes. The first sync is the longest and then it only copies the files that have changed. I then wrote batch files for the individual PCs to backup the fave's, documents and other 'loose' files on the PC to the server to make sure they too get backed up. As for my linux media box, I have a second box in the garage that I rsync the filesystem to every month.
-EB
Do you ever walk alone like a drifter in the dark?
I have a Windows box at home I use for some work-related stuff. I have about 200Gb of changing data that I need backed up regularly. After messin' around with some backup software and hardware, I settled on an external 300Gb USB 2 drive and this simple command saved as a *.bat file and executed from Task Scheduler every night:
/CEDY "C:\" "U:\"
xcopy
Works just fine at no additional software cost.
Before that I tried an old version of Backup Exec and the latest version of Acronis TrueImage and a few other programs. They all have some drawbacks: too complicated, not automated enough, only work with removable media, too CPU or memory intensive, or some other nonsense.
When it comes to backups, simpler is better. HD to HD backups is the way to go. Compressing data is a bad idea. Creating multi-volume backups that span removable media is an even worse idea. I am talking about backups for your home PC, of course. I doubt too many of us can afford a robotic tape library and a NetBackup server.
Sadly, I do not know what the equivalent is for *nix. dd or tar sort of does it, but robocopy has a mirror mode that dd lacks. A quick google search shows some platform-agnostic utilities: http://www.google.com/search?q=robocopy+unix
Let Cobian backup do your backup and then Rsync the image to an external USB. Currently I create True Image backup of my machine and RSync them over to a FreeNAS machine I have on my home network. If you aren't interested in a whole systm image, Cobian should do just fine.
I have been using MSFT OneCare for about 7 months now. I started using it when it was in beta and opted in for a full year for 19.99... It lets me backup to DVD/CDRW or External Drive. I have a 300GB Maxtor OneTouch II USB 2.0 and it just goes out every week and backs up what i want it to. OneCare also providea an outgoing firewall (not too shabby), Antivirus and Spyware (no spam filtering) but its nice.. cheap and you get to run it on 3 PCs... My two workstations and my wifes laptop and its all done...
:)
I know there are probably other solutions out there.. just found that this one works and it IS from MSFT
sig goes here!
I actually went out originally and bought Acronis True Image Home http://www.acronis.com/, for my home system, it's already saved me once. - It does disk images, as well as file based images. - Incremental and Differential - Scheduled backups - Password Protected images. - Operates online to do images. Also if you use the Secure Zone, you can do live restores (Acronis Snap Restore), which would allow you to start a complete restore of the system, and after the essential files are loaded up, it would boot up and restore files in the background, so you can run the system while it's in the process of restoring the complete system. But for $50 US it's a good steal.. My only issue is that you lose download rights after a certain period of time, unless you pay more for that. That I would like changed, but for $50 it's already saved me once. And at work it's become very useful, especially the workstation version that can make images to FTP servers, instead of requiring special severs. Also they have a Universal Restore addon option, that replaces the drivers in the HAL for XP.. though it doesn't work for Unix, but it's not often hard to make a unix box work with new hardware (as long are your modifying the correct kernel). j.
Don't use DVDs. They are slow and cumbersome. Pay the couple of bucks and get an external drive. Then setup a backup routine with ntbackup (it has come with every version of windows and its free! Set it up to run at night when no one is using the computer (difficult in my house as people are using the thing all the time :)
I have used this at customer's sites with a two dive rotation and it has worked very well. I had one customer that somehow managed to wipe their server (still not sure how, but it was 2003 SBS) and had them from dead in the water to fully up and running in 45 minutes. Tape would have taken me a minimum of three hours never mind DVD. It also is quick to backup. Most tape drives take 3 hours to backup an average small server and I can get an external drive backup in 10-30 minutes.
I have used the one touches and tapes. Tapes are slow and I have had major reliability problems and cost per MB seems high. A new (not questionable from ebay) AIT 72GB setup cost one of my customers over a grand (SCSI controller, cables, drive and tapes) versus 100 to 150 per drive for externals. The one touch worked well for a couple of my customers, but I'm not a really good advocate of the Dantz software. Its clunky from the server version I've tried, its confusing versus ntbackup which asks "backup or restore". Easy to figure out as that.
xcopy is good too, but if there is an issue, not too many users these day are familiar with DOS and know how to maintain it versus determine what the issue is.
my 3.14195 cents worth.
>USB hard drives are nice to backup a lot of stuff
If you're only going to make *one* backup and the next time you backup you are willing to overwrite that one.
Maybe your budget allows you to burn through and store a USB drive once per month or whatever.
[I realize your argument is in favor of DVD over discs.]
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
first, create softlinks of all the files and put them into a directory called backup or something.
/tmp/somerandomdir /tmp/somerandomdir /backup > files.tar
then, just use a simple script, something like
mkdir
cd
tar -c
split files.tar -b DVDSIZE
opendir(DIR, ".") || die "can't opendir $directory: $!";
while ($current_file = readdir(DIR))
{
#print "file is $current_file";
mkdir $current_file+"dir"
mv $current_file $current_file+"dir/"+$current_file
mkisofs -o $current_file+".iso" $current_file+"dir"
(can't remember how to burn isos on the commandline)
}
of course, use a real language for the script, pretty it up etc, but it shouldn't be too hard.
Phil
If you have a Mac:
First, get an external firewire drive with sufficient capacity
Second, get superduper (you can run a free version)
Three, tell superduper to make a back up of the whole drive onto your external firewire drive. It will make a fully bootable image of your hard drive on the external drive.
If something bad happens, you can access the files if you need them, or boot off the external drive and you are back in business.
Superduper is very easy to use, and works great.
The single feature that brought PDAs to the masses was the Palm Pilot's one-button sync. Finally people thought of their data as an independent entity, not just the condition they had left one computer or another in.
When home backups are that simple and easy, the computers will start to disappear, and we'll live in our data rather than at "the" computer.
--
make install -not war
I find myself in the same situation after having just bought a digital camera. Suddenly I have lots of data I really, really don't want to lose. I've decided to buy a second hard drive and set up a relatively frequent task that will zip the contents of "My Documents" and store it on the second drive. Zip has an "update" feature that only moves files into the archive when they're newer than what's already in there. So if nothing has been updated, the operation should be relatively quick. Then, every year or so, I'll back up my data onto archival quality (Mitsui Gold) DVDs and move them to a second physical location (most likely a safe deposit box). That way if something happens that would affect both hard drives (like my house burning down) I'll lose at most one year's worth of pictures.
Total cost: $50 every ~3 years for a new hard drive, plus $3 per archival-quality DVD.
Total time: couple-second delay each time the backup process runs, or less if there's nothing to update. Maybe 30 minutes worth of DVD burning once per year.
Risk: Only most recent year's data can be lost, and that only in the event of a total catastrophe.
Sounds like all you need is Burn To The Brim... But honestly, I'd just get a seccond HDD and use a File synchronizer
There are a lot of good suggestions on here, but whatever you use, keep it off site. I haven't seen anybody mention that. All you gotta do is take it to work or your girlfriend's house or somewhere convenient. If there's a fire, or break in, or flood, or whatever you want that backup to be elsewhere.
And also small important files that you edit regularly like source code can be uploaded to your website between full backups.
I thank you for bringing up the Maxtor One Touch. It reminded me of the most recent Consumer Reports mag that I just read on my recent flight. In it they review backup solutions, and the Maxtor One Touch was rated as middle-of-the-road. Seems like the only things going for it are the "Native Backup" and "One Touch" features.
/. actually needs.
The Maxtor One Touch III was rated as Good (60%), while the Iomega offering (Series 33090) was rated as Excellent (84%). The only thing the Iomega is missing is the one-touch feature, which is something I don't think you, I, or anybody on
Also, of the devices 10 they rated/showed, only the Iomega (Series 33090 / Dual Network 33271), Maxtor (F0IG300) and SimpleTech (STI-NAS250) offered "Native Backup".
Look into XCOPY's bigger brother Robocopy. (The Robust File Copier)
It's available in the windows resource kits, which you can download the tools for Windows Server 2003 direct from MS. Just extract robocopy.exe (and robocopy.txt or doc) from it.
DriveImage XML will make CD or DVD size files, it will not burn them automatically. A portable drive is the best way to go as far as media is concerned. DriveImage XML is free and the backup is browsable and allows extraction of single files/folders as long as you did not use RAW format when making the backup. It does NOT do partitioning so you have to prep your new drive before doing a full restore. http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
If you're not processing transactions 24/7 this is pretty simple. I took an old machine, threw in a big ATA drive, and installed Ubuntu Linux and Backuppc, which Ubuntu has packaged. It automatically backs up every machine on my network, both Windows (via SMB) and Linux (via rsync). It has a Web browser interface with the manual permanently on line in the browser. While it doesn't do true "snapshots" it does give you a series of backup points going back in time, It shares redundant files to avoid needless duplication. My backup drive is less than half full. without compression. If space gets tight I can keep adding cheap drives to the backup box (and put them under LVM if I want to see them as a single large storage space). Any one of my drives (including the backup) could of course fail at any time, However, as long as I don't have multiple simultaneous failures, I should be pretty much covered. Barring a fire, I'm pretty safe. I check it every couple of weeks to make sure it is still alive (it always is). You could back up the backup drive to a portable drive every so often and keep those off site. if you were really paranoid,
I have had the occasion to restore from the backup when I did something stupid to a production directory. I found the most recent valid version of the directory among the backups, and just scp'd the entire directory to my production machine.
I've had much more trouble with unreadable tapes than with unreadable drives. I don't know where you are finding sub-$100 tape drives with any capacity. The ones I see are more like $2,000.
You're setting yourself up for failure by utilizing a DVD burner to accomplish your goals here. A portable HDD and ntbackup are all you need, and considering the plummeting cost of storage these days, just about anyone should be able to afford a 250GB removable USB drive. If you want to automate the process, you can do it with one line of code: xcopy "Drive\Directory\*.*" "drive\directory\" /D /E /C /G /H /R /O /Y
Create a scheduled task with the desired parameters.
This isn't that difficult. As with most things Windows, people tend to make it more complicated than it really is. Microsoft also has a utility called synctoy 1.2 that will automate syncronization across drives. As I've said, accomplishing your goal is not difficult. You just have to decide on a course of action ;)
End of Line.
Nero does exactly what you described. In the backup wizard, you simply select the files/directories you want backed up. It will then tell you how many CDs/DVDs it will take to store all of it. And you hit, go. it really is just as simple as you describe.
t's a crappy, slow and expensive medium. Why anyone at all, home users or enterprises still use it is beyond me.
Your cluelessness knows absolutely no bounds. LTO2 for the enterprise is unbelievably fast when used with the right software. Our LTO2 drives at work using Veritas Netbackup and an increased transfer buffer size can EASILY reach 650Mb/sec for a single stream depending on the types of files that are being backed up. Two simultaneous streams easily floods those servers with only a single, gigabit pipe.
"Crappy and slow"? Not modern drives. "Expensive"? That's completely relative. To people who have lost data from never having a backup at all, there are some files, like photos or other such files, that are completely irreplaceable and invaluable. And we've successfully restored data from years back without problems, so reliability isn't necessarily lacking. (Auditors' requiring old data, of course.)
The recent slashdot article about Capricorn selling you a 120TB rack of spinning disks with aggregate throughput of 40Gbps for $200K should put the final nail in tapes coffin.
And as several replies in that thread pointed out, a large number of 4-IDE-drive boxes is completely inadequate for a reliable, enterprise storage solution, particularly for mission-critical data.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
The first hurdle? XP doesn't even have a backup utility by default. Not XP Home anyway. But it *is* on the XP Home disc - you just have to install it yourself by running NTBkSetup.exe or something ridiculous.
So fine, I get that installed. I then make a Scheduled Task to run once a week. That takes a while to sort out, since you need to have a nonempty password to run a 'privledged' task such as one that uses a network connection. Fine. I make sure to check every option that allows this task to run, including "Wake this computer to run this task".
I put my laptop to sleep every night, so you would expect a backup once a week. As of now, my last backup was on 5/9/06.
So, like the submitter, if anyone knows of something for Windows (why are there so many "get a Mac" comments, let alone "Linux!"?) that is easy (c'mon, backups shouldn't be hard), just post it. Some of us will even pay for the damn software.
No, not you, person who just got Slashdot to answer your question. I'm talking about anyone else who wants to backup, but doesn't have the technical skill to.
I'm obviously a bit biased -- I get paid to do this. But here's why I'd recommend this anyway: First, you need backup, unless you're willing to lose everything. Second, you want to be sure your backup solution works, and fits your needs well. You don't want to be burning tons of DVDs worth of music, movies, and games unless you're really sure that's what you want -- and even if it is, you don't want to be burning the same ones every time. You either want an automated OS install with everything you want on it, or you want a disk image, probably both. You want offsite, incremental backup. You want all of that, as cheaply as is reasonable.
So talk to an expert. Set a budget, first (initial and ongoing costs), then tell them your wants/needs. Go over some suggestions with them. And most importantly, once they set it up, you do what they say. If they tell you to run a manual backup every week, do so religiously -- hell, do it after you get home from Church, if it helps you remember. But do it, otherwise it's a worthless solution.
That's generally how I'd approach any problem with a computer -- ask an expert. Sometimes you can figure things out on your own, but backup is too important to do that way. You could be doing something stupid and not know it. A trivial example -- the Penny Arcade guys were doing a backup on a USB keychain -- or maybe it was an external hard drive -- except that they weren't using it as a backup, they were using it as their primary storage, so when the backup died, so did their data.
Oh, and by "expert", I don't mean "overpriced overcertified warm body". I mean someone who knows more about this than you do. At the very least, two of you will be smarter than one.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"real men don't use backups, they just upload to FTP and let the world mirror it".
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I only read the title (too lazy to even read the summary), but really.. who cares if a home user loses all of their precious mp3s and 10,000 pictures of themself. I mean, there are things that you want to keep safe, but what home user has so many documents and priceless pictures that they can't fit them on a single DVD? To make backups easy, just stop backing up every useless piece of crap on your computer. I mean, if I backed up my entire computer, I'd have an entire DVD of World of Warcraft, another DVD filled with other programs I could redownload or install from CDs, another DVD filled with system files that you need to reinstall over every couples months anyway.. (For anyone who's still worried about their amazing mp3 collection, if you downloaded them from iTunes, you can just redownload for free, and if you ripped them from CDs, you're a moron if you threw the CDs away)
How useless is this person's life if 30GB of pirated music is at the top of his list to archive?
For backups I use a wonderful (free as in beer) program called XXCLONE (www.xxclone.com). The program does a complete backup of your installation to any other partition or hard drive and then makes it bootable. I use it with a 60 gig laptop drive I got on eBay I put in an external enclosure. This way if my internal drive eats it, all I have to do is swap the drives out. It works like a charm, I've had the pleasure of using it before when migrating from a 20 gig drive to a new 60 gig one - it is literally a two click process.
Consumer Reports recently had an article on backup solutions, and they are recommending easy-to-use external drive systems.
What's the issue here? Just get a 200gb hard drive for $50 and mirror the data at high speed. Ghost can copy it in a fraction of the time it would take to burn it.
Get a removable hard drive tray for $50 if you do this often or want multiple backups in a rotation.
160-200gb drives are around $50 (sometimes without even a rebate) at least once a month if you search the deal websites.
Use Linux, create a tar archive and use split to divide it into suitable-sized chunks. It's a one-liner.
:-)
Of course, you're on Windows, so you're SOL
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
After years of frustration with a dozen backup systems from Unison, rsync, Windows backup (yikes), Retrospect, etc., and I finally found an elegant, simple, and secure method.
My requirements were:
1. I want to keep the files in their original format -- no proprietary compression/monolithic files
2. It needs to be automated as possible
3. I need to have an offsite rotation
4. It needs to be encrypted
I chose SyncBack as the backup software... freeware is available, but $25 gets you the latest major rev. It supports a ton of features including backup to an FTP site. I also picked up PGP Desktop Pro which includes Whole Disk encryption. That way I can just encrypt my entire 160GB external drive.
The process:
1. Plug in external USB drive (which has been encrypted via PGP Whole Disk encryption)
2. Type in passphrase to unlock drive for the Windows session
3. SyncBack runs 3 scheduled jobs to backup to the USB drive
4. At the end of the backup job, SyncBack automatically pops up an HTML report of what was copied and any errors
5. Once I verify everything looks good, I unplug the USB drive take it to work and give it to a co-worker. If the co-worker tries to plug in the drive to read the data, it just looks like an unformated partition unless he has PGP installed. In that case, it asks for the passphrase (which he doesn't have of course)
6. I take the 2nd USB drive at work home and go to Step 1
Forget the DVD's, use your broadband connection and an online backup provider like Mozy https://mozy.com/?code=2APNT1/ . I like mozy because it is free for 2mb and 30gb costs only 4.95/mo. By the time you deal with swapping blank DVD's and pay for blanks the cost is about the same. Full Disclosure, I do not work for Mozy, I saw a review in PC Magazine that rated them quite high so I thought I would try them out. The above link is a referral link. For those of you who don't like that, edit the URL.
Use a hard drive, using burnt discs is just silly,you need to verify the burn, they get scratched, crack ect...
Microsoft has a free backup utility called Synctoy v1.2 It works better than any other sync/backup software I have ever used for home use. Bust out the wallet and get an external harddrive (usually comes with backup software) or build one yourself even cheaper. Using Disks for backup is just a bad idea.
Between myself, my wife and ... We have several computers in the home. We also have a lot of music and videos on computer.
So, we bought a used 1.2 GHz computer. Loaded it up with disk drives, linux and samba. Added a Gigabit ethernet and some memory but kept it pretty simple. We plugged it into our network switch and away we go.
We backup all of the computers in the house to the server every night over the 1-Gbit network to the server.
The server is a RAID configuration of four 300GB drives so if we lose a drive, we're still OK (we lose two at once, we're screwed).
Then, we just burn incremental DVDs every night and full backups once a week. It's a scheduled task so we just put the DVD blank in at night and go to bed. In the morning, we remove it, put it away and go on our merry way.
We keep the DVDs locked up in our fire vault. You could use a bank safety deposit box or a relative's home or whatever. You want the media secure from theft but readily available.
With low cost used computers and low cost HDD media today, it's a simple solution. No fancy sound cards, video cards and such - just a basic file server with enough capacity to handle the network demands.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
enough said.
Straight to DVD, spanning, compression and encryption when wanted.
Works really well. But like most backup programs, the failure of one media in the set nukes the whole set.
I insert an identical, removabe hard drive and boot using Knoppix. After that it's just
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc
At work for our servers, we have one computer that does nothing but backups and logging. Its 300 gig harddrive is far more than we need for all our backup needs. No disks need to be changed, no labour is needed. Backups happen automatically at off-peak times, and I hardly have to think about them at all. You could do your backups while you sleep and turn your computer off during the day when you're at work.
This solution doesn't have to be expensive either. So long as the BIOS can support the hard drive, it can be an old, slow box that you were about to give away to your second cousin's daughter. And at home, it could just as easily double as your firewall.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I've used the free Cobian Backup software when I need to run backups for Windows:
http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm
I don't know if it does backups to DVDs, as you specifically asked for, but it does a great job of backing up exactly what you want, when you want, and where you want. Did I mention it's free?
But that is only one aspect of backup. ( And it really only works if you make C: read-only; otherwise you might end up with foo.c from 3:00 AM and foo.h from 3:04 AM and they are not consistent - one needs both from 3:00 or 3:04. ZFS sounds nice.)
My big problem is it provides no help if you find that file you want was corrupted/modified/deleted last week or month. The copy you want is no longer on c or d.
Once a week/month/quarter, another task needs to examine the D drive and see which files have not previously been written to DVD and then create on E: DVD-sized (or tape-sized) directories of these new files to later be written to DVD.
I could tell you why I think Time Machine will be easy to use. But then I'd have to arrange for you to be sequstered in a lonely place until after Leopard ships. ;-)
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I've totally given up on optical media backups. The only thing worse than total hard drive failure is critical damage to a disc, where you know 99% of the data is fine, but the lookup table, or a key image segment is unrecoverable. I burn DVDs for organized offline storage and filing, essentially to free up drive space. If I'm REALLY archiving, it's two copies on gold MAM-A CD/DVD media, which Kodak is wisely OEM'ing now.
For 1:1 drive copies I have a 500GB external Lacie drive, which is big enough right now for two machines and a wee laptop. I use Super Flexible File Synchronizer to mirror. Expect to buy another Lacie at some point for shared working data / content creation. It needs decent ventilation; this summer the casing got hot enough to be painful.
I don't touch Maxtor drives anymore because my household replaced *FIVE* Maxtor PATA drives over two years. Warranty replacement drives would come back, and fail under warranty... I finally had to decide not to send them back to stop the cycle of pain.
ReAl MeN DoN'T UsE BaCkUpS!!!
(touch wood)
There's a very good reason Microsoft didn't make it easy. They wanted you to wait so they could sell you their next big thing.
Well, I don't know about doing SIMPLE backup to DVD burners, but my mom just helped me set up my XP system so it automatically backups everything on my hard drive to an external drive.
I tried to back stuff up myself, figuring if my mom can do it using that ultra powerful (cough cough) ntbackup, I can too. Anyway, she learned the steps from this dvd produced by http://store.learningleaf.com/cgi/display.cgi?item _num=06XPBK015, if anyone's mom wants to step into their child's life. For some boring stuff in life, I guess we can leave it to mom...
I find that only the most essential files need to be backed up to absolutely-save medium: resumes, tax forms, address books, etc - basically what you can put on a 8-year-old Palm III. For these I use those indestructible 512MB SD/CF cards or USB keys that are cheap nowadays (you can find those at < $20)
Then there are photographs, config files, IM history, code, and publications that periodic backups to external hard drives would suffice.
I don't bother to backup software, movies and music unless I created them. Why bother? Just re-download or re-install.
Windows' "Briefcase" feature is also quite convenient.
When you sync the briefcase, it checks for changed files. Using a rather nifty interface, it will ask you want you want to do with a changed file:
It's also handy for commuting work back and forth between school on a flash drive. Not sure that this entirely solves the backup problem, but it is a useful and underrated tool. (Not sure how/if it works on Windows versions other than XP)
DATABASE WOW WOW
Have clue, will travel.
I guess I'm missing something. Things being "enterpise" and "mission critical" has nothing to do with the medium, rather the software. Clearly Veritas Netbackup solves your problems on a software level. As far as off-site goes, I suppose a $20K/month Cogent Gigabit internet connection (or cheaper private gigabit connection) can take care of that.
I'm not interested in arguing the merits of backup software or replication/redundancy strategy. I'm complaining about Tape as a medium and tape drives as a transport.
650Mb/sec is pretty crappy. 2 streams "flooding" a server at 1 Gigabit is pretty crappy too. I'm sure Veritas can use a $200K 120TB rack of 40 boxes in parallel and saturate them at 4Gb/sec or (with gig cards) at 40Gb/sec. (making two copies of the data)
As far as costs being relative, I agree whole heartedly. The ability for an administrator to click on a button that does a full or incremental backup of hundreds of servers really has nothing to do with what the ultimate medium is that the data ends up on.
Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive! Maxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive!!! Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive!??!?!! Maxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted. Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted. Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Maxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive!!!!!!Christ, are you getting paid per-mention of their fucking drive or something? God damn it! Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive! Maxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive!!!
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
If you don't have to worry about any single file being larger than the backup medium, and if the backup medium is writable with a drive letter, here's how we'd do it under DOS:
/s
/m /e /h
First, set the Archive attribute on all the files:
> attrib *.* +a
Then, copy a bunch of them until the disk is full. Clear the archive attribute of each file successfully copied:
> xcopy *.* d:
When the xcopy runs up against disk full, break it with Ctrl-C if it hasn't already, then change disks and run the same command again.
This looks like it would all still work on a modern system, unless you're worried about alternate data streams, access control, or stuff like that.
I understand a lot of people do home 'backups' by using an external hard drive...but unless you are moving the external drive to a safe site outside of your home, you have not truly protected your data.
I'm not saying that having a good onsite backup is useless. It basically protects you from hardware failure or accidental deletion of your data. But it does nothing to protect your data from the risk of fire, flooding, theft, or other natural or manmade threats and disasters that can effect your entire home and its contents.
Yes, the odds of a given disaster striking over a short time frame are low. But over the course of a lifetime, it is far from unlikely that you may be affected by such an event.
How valuble is your data to you? Music, software, and the like can be replaced by spending money. But what about decades worth of photographs, home videos, diaries? What about manuscripts, source code or other data that could be the work of a lifetime?
Whatever method you choose for home backup, if your data matters to you it is essential to find a way to keep backups offsite...but this is acutally done all too rarely. It's unfortunate that more effort has not been made to create widely-availible, easy to use, and reasonably priced solutions for this problem.
Backup was the first thing that came to my mind when reading the posters requirements, because it backs up whatever you like across as many DVD's (or CD's) as needed, all as plain files you can pull off by hand later if for some reason you do not have Backup.
I'm surprised there are not more solutions that provide this very simply ability that really is a lifesafer when you just want to recover a little data.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I use the following script to backup my Window box.
/D/BACKUP
/C/Documents\ and\ Settings/nwk
.tar, tar is universally available, and you have a single file that can be easily burned to disc.
It is a shell script that I run under Cygwin that creates a tar backup of a given directory. It also creates a log file of the backup and an error file that you can inspect for files that were not successfully backed up.
Put the mybackup.sh script somewhere accessible to your PATH variable
Set the BACKUPDIR variable to your backup directory.
I backup to my second hardrive at D:\BACKUP so I set BACKUPDIR to
I backup my directory with the following command from the the Cygwin command line:
mybackup.sh
with tab completions it's something more like:
myb[TAB]/C/D[TAB]nwk
If you want you can set up a cron task to schedule automated backups at regular intervals. You could also modify this script for incremental backups.
This script can also be used on Linux and UNIX systems (just change the BACKUPDIR). What I like about this script is I can see what didn't get backed up , restored backups preserve the file and directory timestamps, the backups all have a unique name based on the directory name + date + timestamp
mybackup.sh:
#!/bin/sh
#2005-08-11
PATH=/bin
#for testing
#SRC="/C/temp"
#first argument is path to backup
SRC=$1
echo $1
BACKUPDIR="/D/BACKUP"
DIRNAME=`dirname "${SRC}"`
BASENAME=`basename "${SRC}"`
TIMESTAMP=`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M`
ARCHIVENAME="$BASENAME-$TIMESTAMP"
TARFILE="${BACKUPDIR}/${ARCHIVENAME}.tar"
LOGFILE="${ARCHIVENAME}_out.txt"
LOGFILE="$BACKUPDIR/$LOGFILE"
ERRORFILE="${ARCHIVENAME}_err.txt"
ERRORFILE="$BACKUPDIR/$ERRORFILE"
echo $TARFILE
echo $LOGFILE
echo $ERRORFILE
#change directory to create relative path tape archive
cd "$DIRNAME"
tar cvf "${TARFILE}" "${BASENAME}" 1>"${LOGFILE}" 2>"${ERRORFILE}"
As any professional IT will tell you, use NT Backup. It can backup any drive, even the huge 2GB drives that will be flooding the market any time now.
Any system that requires handling media is no good for home. At home, there is too much other life to live to spend it doing backups. That's why at work they have to pay people to schlepp around locked boxes of tapes going off-site.
The four risks:
1) Ack! My hard drive just seized up!
2) Opps... I wish I hadn't deleted that.
3) Oh oh.... I wish I hadn't deleted that 3 days ago...
4) AAAAIIEEEE! My house just burned down and took 5 years of tax data and all my photos with it!
My system:
1) Home fileserver, Linux of course, sits in the corner and holds files. It uses software raid (simple mirroring), because at home it is not being hit very hard and performance is not an issue. It has an el-cheapo CPU. It uses cheapo ATA drives, because wifey will never miss the file server for 4 hours if I have to swap out a drive -- hot swap is for workgroups with 24x7 requirements.
2) My workstation (Linux/Win dual boot), and my wife's (OS X), do a daily rsync to the fileserver. My wife can't be bothered to learn about fileshare directories and so forth, and there is no reason to tell her. She just uses her Mac like an independant Mac, and once a day a scheduled job does rsync. I do the same with a cron job on my Linux box, which runs linux 99% of the time, and the linux partition has read access to the NTFS partition, so it can back up the Windows side well enough for my purposes. So, risks #1 and #2 are handled. For risk #3, the backup script rsyncs to one directory 6 days per week, and another 1 day per week. The weekly keeps a second back-rev of every file (it's an rsync option). So, risk #3 is covered.
3) Risk #4 requires off-site backup. A pair of USB drive enclosures solved that. The file server has a cron job that backs up the raid partition by mount/rsync/umount to the USB drive. Every once in a while, the USB drive at home gets swapped with the USB drive in the bank box. That is the only time I handle media.
On the Mac, I just use Carbon Copy Cloner (the excellent SuperDuper works too). I make a fully bootable copy of my hard drive every few weeks. (If you can of course clone this identical copy back to any number of Macs.) Why is this still so complicated on the Windows side? I don't understand why people even bother.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
Here are some more specs to my situation:
I already have a dvd writer and blank dvd's, so software solution is attratcive.
This system needs to exist because XP with a dvd writer is so prevalent today, and if I can find a solution, then I can duplicate it anyware OR anyone else (my family, friends work, &c.) can duplicate the solution.
Yes, my mp3's are valuble to me. I'm not interested in duplicating all those non-billable hours to re rip/encode everything ever again. Plus I no longer have some cds/got them from other sources, &c.
My mp3 collection grows, but those files rarley 'change', so an initial full copy makes sense. Right now I can fit all of it (~30GB) on 5 or 6 discs. They are cheap! I can make redundant copies/sets if I'm worried about bad media.
Dvds travel nicely. Dedicated hardware does not. In the past I have given copies of my backup cds to friends I trust who live in a different physical location. Fire, Government seisure, &c. is not a social networking thing and I want to be able to have my stuff (data) if I should suddenly never see my computer or house again. Spare drive in the same box doesn't help me there. I currently keep a cd backup of my critical data in my 'Go Bag' with my passport, other important docs, change of close, flashlight, water, first aid, &c. You do have a 'Go Bag' don't you?
Again, it needs to be readable, uncompressed, cdfs layout (or dvdfs, if that exists). Just pop it in any old dvdrom drive and read/copy whatever you like. Also helpful if I need to 'lend' mp3s to someone.
I don't want to calculate copysize to match to dvd 4.7G. That is a tedious manual process that will have to be repeated everytime. The routine needs to do that for me and just say, "insert disc 2 of 6".
The bottom line is, this needs to exist. I know of many people who this would take care of all their needs.
Please reply if YOU HAVE DONE THIS and KNOW A WORKING SOLUTION, not just theorizing. Thx.
Can anyone supply some experience about the lifetime of different backup media alternaives? Afaik tapes are still the most reliable format, but they are slow and rather expensive for home use.
The DVD on the other hand, apparently prime backup medium for home users suffers quite short life times (physical and chemical degradation) sometimes lasting just months before first signs of data corruption. DVD-RAM was supposed to solve this (I'm quite a fan of those, doublesided ones look pretty cool too when taken out of their box, so if everything fails you still have decoration for the xmas tree) with supposedly 30 years+ life time, but few burners support them and so they are far more expensive than their DVD-Rs counterparts. The ones I have work flawlessly, but capacity is limited and handling requires extra care (my burner doesn't accept cardriged ones).
I've shifted to harddisks though, because imho they give me the most bang for the buck. Considering all the HDs I bought lasted several years running more or less continuously a HDD that's plugged in only once in a while should keep even longer. And when the time comes to upgrade the capacity of the backup medium one can simply buy a bigger new HD, no further hazzle with DVD-/Tape-drives, media or drivers.
An interesting option (for some people) would be flash drives or SD cards and the like. Though I have no idea about durability and lifetime of these guys, but from my experience they seem viable too - the 128MB CF card I bought for my cam ages ago still works without a hitch even though I tossed it around quite a bit. Capacity and price may be a drawback.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Hard drives are cheap, especially if you're only backing up 30gb.
On POSIX Operating Systems you can use GAFFitter.
Description:
Genetic Algorithm File Fitter (gaffitter) is a command-line tool that uses a genetic algorithm to extract subsets of an input list of files and directories that best fit a given volume size such as a CD or DVD. This is used to find different combinations of the files on the list such that lost space will be minimized.
And how long will it take the next Windows virus / spyware program to infest you still-attached backup harddisk with the same sh*t that you need your restore for?
Try a technology that has been along for a lot longer. Get a decent tape drive. USB or Firewire makes it easy to attach, and backup of 150+ GB are simple. So far I have yet to see a virus that attacks tape devices.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Easy solution (which I use): work with a friend and do cross backups.
We both have the same Lacie USB drive, and we meet often enough for stuff other than computing to make this viable (and he lives nearby as well). I back up his system on a section on my external drive, and he does the same for mine, and backups are password protected.
We both use Acronis True Image as that allows restore from the ground up, including Linux ext3 partitions. OK, Acronis costs money but I've found it more than worth it over time, it works for me better than Ghost but that obviously depends on your needs.
Insert
Backing up data files and restoring them might be easy, but how do you do a system restore after a disk crash? Not too hard for Linux, but what about Windows?
An image backup with Knoppix is the only good solution I know but it wastes space because all unused blocks are saved too.
Data de-dupe seems all the rage recently. Does anyone know a FOSS tool that tracks block hashes and lets me do an incremental image backup?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
For my home network, I have a system that is a fileserver (NFS/linux and no gay-windows allowed on my network). I have 4 drives in it, all in drive trays. hda is an OS disk, just a old crummy 4GB drive someone gave me. The other three are 250GB drives, they hold my data, the box doesn't have any fancy RAID built into it, so they're just individual disks. One holds music ogg files, another holds howard stern show ogg files, the third stores my "files" all the various files, documents, pics, video, porn, etc that I've collected over the years. I have another box which is a a junk K6-2 someone gave me, which also has 4 drives with trays in it. With the same setup as the first. A script runs every week, it copies the three drives from the fileserver to the junk machine. it does one drive a night, on nights when I'm at work. Then I have a 2nd set of three drives, in trays sitting on the shelf. When the weekly routine is complete, I swap the drives in the junk machine with the ones on the shelf. The script blanks the disk before the copy is written to it, so there's no cruft in my fresh backup copy. The drive trays make swapping the disks sweet, especially when the OS disk dies, which happened recently.
It is a bit of overkill, having 9 250GB drives, I admit, but I got one for 80$ when I had to replace one months ago, so its not that much money. And I really don't want to lose any of my files, period. I have shit going back to high school (which is saying a lot since I graduated in '89 especially since I can hardly ever bring myself to delete anything). I always have access to my files, even when the copies are being made. I always have a backup copy on my shelf protected from hackers, and except when the scripts are running I have an live copy on a seperate machine. Convienent has hell. When I start sending the copies to Iron Mountain, you'll know I've really gone off the deep end.
start > run > ntbackup.exe (assuming you're running XP Pro)
You can back up everything including the running system state so you can do a total system rebuild from backups. Although as everyone has suggested use a hard disk. probably cheaper in terms of time and media combined but that's just my $0.02
I have been using Cobian Backup http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm for quite some time now. You can do all the normal scheduling of jobs. Importantly, it allows the use of containers (and encryption) OR a flat file structure. It also allows you to have Full, Incremental and Differential backups so that you can go back in time for those lost files.
I do my backup to a second PC hard disk, but, I believe Tape is supported too. The most important thing I have that I don't want to lose are my photos, these are also periodically archived to a DVD (1 per year) and are stored 'offsite' at my office, so that if something truly horrible happens at home, I still have my photos in a safe place. (The years of photos that have been archived to DVD already are excluded from the regular backup to save some disk space).
"If it's lost, it'll turn up. Things always do" "I love it when a plan comes together"
Use iTunes, set disk burning preferences to "data disk", select your whole library, click on "Burn" and make sure you have a small pile of DVDs available. If you keep your iTunes library outside your home directory, most likely your home directory is less than a DVD, so that is no problem either.
A search on Google turns up Cobian Backup, which is free and appears to support incremental backup. Failing that, a query to SourceForge turns up at least two separate projects that seem functional enough. I'll be trying them out tonight.
I backupped once in the last couple of years. HDD started to make noise. Then I tried Retrospect 7.5. HDD broke within the trial period :)
It can create a restoration install CD, which is kind of useful.
90 percent of these posts are jackasses talking about what they can do in Linux, MacOS, or saying that he should buy other hardware. That's what it seems like. Thanks Slashdot for the -5, I'm-a-fracking-embicile-who-doesn't-understand-the -question answers.
If the OP sees this, this is exactly what you need:
http://www.backup4all.com/
They have a fully functional 30 day trial, it's easy as hell to use, and if you decide to buy it, it isn't too bad price wise. It should meet all your requirements. To all you jackasses bringing up Linux(I'm a Linux user myself), MacOS(fucking weenies), or telling him to invest in new hardware, I'd like to buy you all a round of STFU. Morons.
This is a problem I've been thinking about a lot recently. Every few days I come across something else that changes my thinking, and I think this article has pretty much brought everything to a head.
A few people here have mentioned that backup is such a tricky proposition because everyone has different needs. The setups I have been thinking about I think cater to the needs of the average tech-savvy person on Slashdot, and I'd love to hear responses on them:
My first thought is to have two entirely separate disks or arrays of disks: one for system data and the other for personal data. This solution is cheap and fairly easy to do. Install your OS, apps and all related files on one disk or array; if you have a fast, expensive disk or an array you can stripe, this is where you would do it to maximize speed. The other half is where you store your personal data. Originally I planned for this to be a two-disk mirror, but after reading some of the excellent comments here, I can't believe I thought it was a good idea to use RAID-1 as an actual backup mechanism. Anyways, this method is cool because all you need is a data copy of the "personal data" disk - it doesn't need to be bootable, you can remove it and store it somewhere safe, and it can easily be attached to another system. Most OSes can map the standard "My Documents"-type folder to another directory besides the default one, including putting it on a separate drive. The cons with this setup is that some personal data invariably gets jumbled into the system and is not something you would ordinarily think to back up.
The other option I am thinking of is to locate all of your files on a single disk or array, and back that up to a mirror copy (bootable and all) that could then be removed and stored somewhere safe. This ensures that you don't lose any of that personal data that gets stored with the OS and system files.
This is where my subject line question comes in. If you need a "perfect copy" of a drive, bootable and all, couldn't you just plug it in, enable RAID, rebuild the mirror from the disk/array you have onto the backup disk, then power off, unplug the backup and reboot? That way you have a 1:1 copy - if your hard drives spontaneously combusted inside your system you could just plug this one in and go. If your whole system went kaput, you may not be able to boot from the drive on another system if it had different hardware, but at least you have all of the system files and you could recover anything on the whole disk.
NW
What if "mywindowspartition.image" is bigger than 1 dvd?
How do you split it up?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Which is why I founded a company to do just that (I did say shameless promotion). Backups should occur at LAN speeds, be strongly encrypted, stored offsite, and not require any great effort by the user. Further, they should not charge an absurd fee and have an annoying interface, as most online storage providers do.
Thus I give you http://www.zettabytestorage.com/, secure backups in at least two geographically diverse locations, with local LAN access speeds, for less then $0.50 per GB and up to 700GB. You put your data on our NAS box and it gets backed up, thats it. You don't have to worry about failing hardware (we replace it free), local disaster (fire, flood, etc.), or really anything this side of the collapse of civilization as we know it. Your data is safe, both local and remote.
I do work for Zettabyte Storage, and if you know of an easier way to backup your data, I'd like to hear about it.
Building a better backup.
Zettabyte Storage
I work in a video organization. The average project we work on for DVD production is between 100 and 150 gigs of data. We have approximately 500 projects per year of that size. We are the extreme situation, but it has taught me a lot of thing regarding backing up.
For my home server, I have a small, 5 terabyte system that is actually configured as single drives. I used to run a stripe, but that is the worst idea ever and I decided that given my storage needs, the cost of a backup solution that was reliable was less expensive that a RAID controller able to handle 5 terabytes across 14 drives.
At first, the solution was DVDs. As my storage grew, I moved to removable hard drives. This was a bad idea. Hard drives are good online storage but only substandard offline storage. Hard drive error correction only seems to work correctly when the drive is powered. Besides, noone can predict how long a powered down drive can hold its data for.
So here's what I did. I have a partition which contains files I create. The rest of the storage is for files I copied. The files I create is a mere 150gigabyes. These files I can't lose and because of that, they require a reliable long term storage system. The files which I copied, such as my TV recordings and DVD backups (I store all my purchased DVDs on a central system), are either backed up to hard drive or considered to be losable.
The long term backup system I use is a cheap DLT drive from EBay. After checking prices, I've seen them being won for $10. The tapes are of course expensive, but they're worth it. See DLT offers a solution that is different than hard drive and DVD. Recordable DVD has terrible longevity. Hard drives typically do not state how long they will retain data in a powered off state. I assume it will be a while, but in reality a while can be a 10 years or 3 months.
Using DLT tape is a huge benefit since DLT is designed from the ground up for data retension, not necessarily for speed. If you have files you want to keep for 15 years, DLT tapes are a far more reliable form than alternate media.
P.S. For a fun note, my most reliable backup system yet has been printouts. I wrote a program when I was a teenager that simply made use of a 300dpi laser printer to spew out binary data encoded as dots. Every kilobyte was checksummed. I stored about 1.2 megabytes per page. This means on 500 sheets of american letter paper, with a half inch margin, I could store 600 megabytes of data. As little as a year ago, I scanned the first 15 pages using a 1200 dpi scanner and wrote a program to decode the data, well, over 99.95% of the data was entirely intact. I had a total of two checksum failures. The pages were 11 years old. Viewing the pages, I was able to decipher with a magnifying glass the failed bits and manually correct them. I'll write again in 8 more years to tell you how it worked out over a period of 20 years. I'm guessing I'll be asked how the pages were stored. I stored them in a plastic laminated cardboard box.
Most of it is MP3s... I want a routine to simply write my selection to the DVD writer and spread it across however many discs are required.
I'm not sure about the other files, but seriously, iTunes is the best free (as in gratis, not libre) program for managing MP3 files. You install it, show it your whole collection, make a playlist for the whole thing, select it, click on the "burn" icon, and keep on feeding it DVDs until it's copied all of the files to them. Why other software isn't this easy, I'm not sure.
Many people solved that problem by downloading the freeware version of XXCOPY which actually works right. At least it always has for me and I've never seen any complaints from any others.
I'm not sure that you still need to worry about that. But I'm not sure that you don't.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Which makes me wonder... would there be any such thing as a rolling RAID setup?
;)
I.e. it's live with one drive on Day 1, then live with the next on Day 2, live with another on Day 3 and so forth and so on until you run out of the number of drives?
That way you would always have rolling backup as old as numDrives * interval, as well as a live RAID in case just the main drive fails?
Just curious - it doesn't sound very economical
If you have a Mini-DV camera you can get between 10 and 20 GB per tape, and a DV-tape is about the same or cheaper than a blank DVD.
Article here
Of course, recovering from tape is a more cumbersome since you can't just plug it in a start browsing the files. But then again, it's better to minimize the effort on something you do often (creating the backup) rather than something you do seldom (recovering from a backup).
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
I bought a 1 gb USB flash memory, which I use to only do a backup of essential files such as My Documents, projects, programming source code, etc.
.7z archives. You can also use password protection and AES encryption.
I wrote a simple batch script using the command line version of 7-Zip to automatically compress a couple of predefined folders into
Then you can move the files to the USB manually, or make the script do it for you.
I soon intend to write a nice shell script with encryption, dates, hashes, etc.
Adding more drives on a different system and then having a backup strategy between the systems may work. They can not have connected filesystems and should retain data that has been removed from the master for some time.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
WinRAR is far from free, you'd do better to recommend 7-zip. However, if you read the original post, your recommendation is far from suitable. The poster wants to be able to select a bunch of files, turn a knob, flip a switch, burn a bunch of DVDs consecutively, and have all his files on them uncompressed. At best, wasting 30GB of hard disk space to create split archives for the purpose of easy burning to DVD can be considered a dirty hack at best, it would take too long, and would leave the files compressed, which the OP didn't want either. Bonus to you for also throwing in a proprietary data wrapper (RAR), you insensitive clod!
I haven't had a tape or other backup device in what seems like an eternity.. I've lost 2 drives total over the past 5 years, and both incidents went off without a hitch.
There are two reasons why I don't trust an external HD (such as maxtor one touch)as a sole means of backup. - If lighting strikes, electric systems can die. So both your pc and your backup can be dead. - An external HD is a nice and shiny thing next to your computer: burglars will most certainly take it together with your computer, leaving you without hardware and data. They most probably will not take used DVDs stored in another room. So, a HD is very useful for a fast and easy backup, but I would still backup de backup disk from time to time on DVD.
You are 100% correct. The issue isn't that home backups are difficult or expensive in 2006, it's that he's got a 2003 way of looking at things. By far the best backup technology for home users is the USB hard drive. They even come bundled with backup software. Can't get much better than that.
I think the issue really comes down to most users can't be bothered to do the bare minimum for their computers. I remember in the days of mice with balls, I'd go to people's houses to fix their computers and many would have almost unusuable mice. VERY few people would ever clean them. Even after I'd show them how, they never would. It can be done (literally) in under a minute and only needs to be done every few months. And even THAT was aparently too much.
So the masses won't backup their data until it is forced down their throats by Dell. When Dell starts bundling all their systems with pull out USB hard drives and backup software that has reasonable defaults in case it is never configured, then we'll see users backup data. Basically, if consumers have to put forth _any_ effort at all, it isn't going to happen.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Disclaimer: I am an employee of Acronis.
Disclaimer: the following is the author's personal opinion and is not the opinion or policy of his employer
Acronis True Image Home ($49.99 if buying online) has all the features you seek, except for one - not using any proprietary file format for backups. It should be noted though that what you ask for is simply not possible to do in many cases, since some special format is needed to handle things such as splitting of large files into chunks small enough to fit on one CD/DVD, and even more so for incremental backups and other advanced features; so any sufficiently advanced backup software is going to use some proprietary format for this purpose (for the lack of any open standard on such things). However, if your worry is that you will not be able to access your backups if you ever lose the software, then it is not the issue: when backing up to CD/DVD, you have an option to have it bootable and include the restore component of the software. If you need to restore at any later point, and do not have True Image installed, you can still boot from that CD/DVD, and have all the functionality readily available.
The thing you're missing is that disk space starts to look rather expensive amd not very reliable when you have to keep full (not incremental) backups of a large database for any length of time. "Any length of time" in this case being 10 or 20 years.
tar has multi-volume feature where you can specify the size of the media to back up. It does not do compression at all.
:-)
On Windows you can use cygwin to call tar, on new Mac systems you probably can use the fact that it is built upon Unix (OS X system), on Unix - obviously, yes.
The problem with line endings in ASCII files remains though: Windows for some reason has "\r\n" line endings, while all other systems have "\n" only.
tar is command-line, so some people will say not user friendly enough. I won't
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Carbon Copy Cloner is also another good Mac OS X backup utility that can make a bootable, mountable disk image or directly bootable copy of a partition.
Highly recommended.
(I am not affliliated with CCC, just a happy user)
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Simple backup system you ask? Well, I'm taking my hat off for Apple, who's "TimeMachine" feature in the OSX Leopard is quite amazing.
t ml
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.h
You can say allot about Apple, but I think their style of inovation is some times stunning (:
Best,
. Knut S.
If you really don't have any other option than backing up to DVDs, then how about this?
Install WinRAR, right-click the directories that you want to back up, click 'Add to archive...', choose the option to split into DVD-sized chunks*, select whichever compression method you'd like, and then wait while it creates the archive files.
Now install QuickPar, perhaps read a parity file tutorial if you're unfamiliar with the concept, and then create a set of parity files to restore any corrupt or damaged data.
* Or perhaps it would be better to create files of just under 45 MB each, and burn 100 of them to each DVD.
I feel sorry for you for asking this question, I really do.
Everyone is so damn helpful to your problem, except for the fact that every nerd will want to give you advice for MacOS, Linux, RAID configurations, backup computers with cron-scripts, and every other thing you didn't ask about. Never mind the fact that you don't own the equipment and software they namedrop, and that what you ask should be really easy to do somehow. It's still lame old Windows with just a DVD-writer, that's not hightech enough and so it's not a valid question on Slashdot.
At least make the posters here happy now that they can drop what awesome hardware they own and what much cooler OS'es they run than you and the average computer using sucker out there (which includes me.)
Boot Knoppix, open a root terminal, run PartImage. Yes, it will adequately backup XP NTFS and the MBR.
Burning several disks is so 1996. You can net backup to a central repository with PartImage if you have several machines.
Why not try Internet Backup: http://www.your-data.co.uk/
Supports Windows, Mac and *nix.
Download GNU tar for Windows via Cygwin.
tar --tape-length=4900000 -cvMf backup.tar Folder_To_Backup/
When you are prompted to change media burn the file backup.tar to the first DVD (removing it from its current location), then continue. This will create a new file of the same name (backup.tar), which will actually be part 2. Burn this to DVD and so on, labeling the DVDs accordingly.
To extract: /cygdrive/[dvd drive leter]/backup.tar
tar -xvMf
cat list-of-important-files | cpio -o | gzip | split -b $DVD_BYTES
For extra credit, xor all blocks together and burn the result.
...you lose the lot. not a great solution.
XCOPY only gives you the choice of replacing or not replacing existing backup copies. Mine does versioning because if it turns out one of your mail folders got corrupted 3 weeks ago, getting last week's backup copy isn't going to do you much good.
Bought a refurb drive, put it in an external USB drive box. Once a week everyone gets a complete backup. Keep the last or the last two for each machine. Simplest thing in the world.
I got this with the last copy of Roxio EasyCD I picked up; it's Veritas backup for Windows. I have an old 40Gb drive from my previous system I added on, and this package backs up the C drive weekly in the wee hours of Sunday morning to the NTFS partition I created there. Once a month I do a backup to a stack of DVD-RW platters, and a weekly differential to one disc (belt AND suspenders, thank you). The software itself I keep on a mini-CD in the wallet with the DVD backups.
The software itself is fairly straightforward to configure and schedule with. So far for me it Just Works.
[Yah I know it's a Windows package, but that's where this guy is. This is reasonably cheap ($30-40 US) and does the job.]
Buy a second drive and copy the entire primary drive over once a week.
The second drive can be internal, in a different system on the network or in an external USB case.
Why copy only once a week? Well, if your system gets hacked, if might take a week for you to realized it. Now you have a complete copy of the OS, programs and data right there to compare against.
If you have a failure, chances are, the really important stuff is over a week old. If you have more important items that you can't lose, copy those do a special place over the internet whenever they care changed.
I use rsync over ssh to do this http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/. I didn't care about platform independence, but the program works under cygwin if you want to go between windoze and unix systems. Rsync only copies change data so it is highly efficient and very quick after the initial copy is made.
Oh, it is free.
If you only want to backup a selected subset, rsync has lots of options including "include" or "exclude" file lists.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
I've become interested lately in network-based backup. That is, I don't have any dedicated "backup media", but instead I just ensure that my important stuff ends up stored on the hard disks of at least two computers somewhere. Right now my solution to this is lame: I just copy the stuff about manually. This means I don't have any idea where a file can be found, there's no record of which copy is the "definitive" copy (ie, the one I should edit), and there's no automated way to restore everything. I've been hoping that someone would come along and make a tool to make this easier.
I found a half-finished thing called Brackup which looks like it was trying to go in this direction, with the extra ability to backup to things like Amazon's network storage service, and with encryption so that you can (with the appropriate amount of caution) back up to systems you don't necessarily trust with your data. Then you just need to back up the much-smaller "index file" to some removable media and store it somewhere safe.
Ideally, though, I want something that's one level above that where it just figures out itself where everything should be replicated to based on conditions like "all of my documents must be stored at at least two premises", and it'd then know that it's not sufficient to back up stuff from the desktop machine in my house to the server in my house -- it must use a host outside my LAN. It would also keep track of the amount of space allotted to backups on each machine and avoid using up too much space, warning me if it was unable to satisfy my criteria so that I can either add more targets or increase the allotted storage space.
The main thing I like about network backup is that I don't have to fumble about with physical media. All of my computers have got spare disk space, and the disks are already there and plugged in, so why screw about with DVD media or tapes? Backups need to just happen automatically in the background or I'll never bother to make them.
xcopy won't remove deleted files, though that may be viewed as a plus for a backup. However, if you rename files or folders you endup with duplicates on the backup media.
...)
Learn to use rsync, you only need the client for a local backup and it runs under XP with only cygwin.dll (no need for the full cygwin setup). Setup a one-way mirror, so that deletions and renames are propagated.
Been doing that for quite a few years now. For each machine in my home network I perform a rsync backup in two phases: first "pass" backups to a separate backup volume on the same machine. The second "pass" backups to a backup share on an external USB HD that I take off-site for protection against burglary, natural disasters or plain old Murphy.
(remember to have backups stores offsite kids! Think of Katrina and 9/11
get a real computer man wtf is wrong with you?
I hope that Time Machine finally solves my daily backup problems. I never found any software that could handle my environment (many systems, mobile devices) with little configuration or without headaches.
Since you are storing so little data, I would suggest you open an account with Amazon S3 and let them worry about the storage (combine that with Jungle Drive and Novell netdrive to create a pseudo network drive on your machine - both software are a snap to setup). Then you grab your favorite winrar, winzip, archive program, and you RTFM (many people find software "hard to use" but they don't even bother learning how to use them). You schedule an archive update every week and you're done. Works great for me. I backup all my important files (pr0n and MP3 don't count) to an S3 container and I am happy as can be.
The second hard disk is running linux. You're also free to put it in a drive tray and pull it out (they're less than $20.00 and it means you can back up multiple machines to one disk and/or copy your backup to another box). It will also save you some wear and tear, and a bit of electricity.
Tapes are SO 70s.
http://ds9a.nl/splitpipe/examples.html
a rnmore/bott_03july14.mspx
Combined with growisofs and tar it is a nice archive tool. Pretty flexible. The down side of all this multi-volume stuff is you have to be there unless you have the big bucks for things like tape changers. Archiving to another hard drive is your best bet for hands off.
Isn't there a built in thing for Windows?
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/le
Have you tried this?
Take a look here:s p
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1744196,00.a
and look at the user reviews to see that these drives have problems.
I personally don't own one, but after reading this, I wouldn't touch one with a 10 foot pole.
Splitting files trying to take as much space possible on specific-size media is one of many NP problems. You can't (AFAIK and so far) find the optimum solution unless you try all combinations. That's a known fact, and I would assume that the backup software developers know it too.
However, for my purposes, I have developed a generic module for this in Python, because I have similar needs (mostly media files, with some simple rules about files belonging together or requiring some ordering), and almost always the solutions that can be found in very little time are more than satisfactory (usually filling more than 99% of each medium). Finding a good enough solution covers my needs, and I assume this would also be the case for the majority of others.
I agree that this would be a very welcome addition to all backup software.
I speak England very best
Bytecc makes a usb to ide/sata adapter for about $30 that can basically turn an internal drive into an external. with today's plummeting HDD prices, this would make a cheap and easy way to backup large amounts of data.
it can sometimes be a little quirky, and it probably isnt reliable enough to be used as a makeshift external drive, but it's definitely adequate for backups.
And when somebody steals the computer, how do you restore the data?
Can I get a one-and-a-half-terabyte tape/tape drive combo? Can I afford it? I want backups to run while I'm not around and let me know if there's a problem later. With three removable 500G drives I can make one image of my machine for about $3600 (at the moment the usb drives are about $600ea, but you need 2 sets for the possibility of a breakdown while writing the backup) but a similarly-capable tape system was somewhat more expensive and requires more care for storage of the tapes.
I use a program called Second Copy by Centered ( http://www.centered.com/ ). Works great and can be automated. I use it for disk-to-disk backups across my LAN and to a second drive in my PC, but it does removable media as well.
This also goes as a warning to anyone with an Asus A8N-SLI and possibly other nForce 4 boards as well. Do NOT reinstall Windows without first making a backup, and here's the real important part, make sure that the backup media is read only or completely detached from the box in question. Asus makes good hardware and this board has been rock solid for me in every other instance, but as noted in the big red lettering on the BIOS update page, if you don't have the nForce drivers installed you face the potential of data loss. That's all well and good when you flashed your BIOS with an up to date XP install. Specifically, and this will be my universal approach now, do not let CHKDSK run from boot, in fact avoid it like the plague unless you've initiated the check.
That said, I lost a significant amount of data, including my Firewire drive on which I had copied lots of files. Fortunately, I replaced the drive that carried my backup set and the 1TB RAID 0 stripe is actually the one attached drive that remained intact because I split the partitions up. Between the two, I held on to lots of important stuff by a thread, even with the aid of OnTrack Easy Recovery which didn't buy me anything from the wiped drives.
My new backup strategy is this:
I've purchased two 300GB external Seagate drives and they will be taking turns each day with backup duty. This way, if the backup drive gets wiped by BIOSes, a nasty virus, or God knows what else, I'll have a non-wired drive to go from. I'm going to be doing more frequent burn-offs of critical data and at least one burnoff for everything I download that's worth hanging onto. I keep my downloads on my drives permanently now because drive space just isn't that expensive anymore.
300GB is more than enough space to back up everything that is critical with daily backups that aren't recycled, so I also have a level of lazy version control, which is a bonus. I've been doing this with Dantz Retrospect Express which has been more than adequate.
Hmmm.
Cost of 8 DVD-Rs: about GBP 4.00
Cost of 21k floppies: about (2.1k packs of 10 @ GBP 2 per pack) = GBP 4,200.00
Cost of external HDD: about GBP 100.00
If you're permanently archiving the stuff (which is a good idea, IMO) or sending copies off to different locations (which is almost essential, if you value your data), the choice is clear.
It has always been a big problem for me that you cannot create full system backups if you are using a Microsoft Windows system. Period. Yes, you can back up some data - but thats where it ends. With Linux systems its easy - things like mkCDrec get you backed up and restored in moments. Try doing anything similar with Microsoft Windows... welcome to blue screen. I've even shelled out hundreds for things like "BackupExec" with its special "Intelligent Disaster Recovery" module. Hopefully things will be different with Vista. No, I'm not holding my breath.
Futhermore, I have nothing against tapes, and actually use one at work to put huge files away (glad I don't have to put them on DVD, my first 200 GB tape is still only half full) but they're really not very cheap compared to harddisks, and you'll have to buy a new tapedrive as soon as harddisk capacity goes up. At work we have a lot of 8 GB tapedrives lying around, which all had cost a fortune (say 10x cost of a comparable harddrive) but are now redundant. Since it is for home use, you will never use an amount of tapes that makes this still cost efficient. Also, when your tapedrive breaks, or you need to transport information, you'll need another costly tapedrive! These things are really interesting for corporate environments only.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
a 5 year warranty doesn't mean your backup drive is good for 5 years. It just means that the manufacturer believes the quality is good enough that the number of warranty returned drives over 5 years will have minimal impact to their bottom line. (I've got some 10 year old disks that are still working, and a 2 year old disk that's fried. Something about storing it out in the garage for a year....)
We've all heard the stories about a HD failing within a week. You address this by buying several HDs, from different lots at the least, and different manufacturers at best. (The odds of getting multiple bad drives and needing to restore from those drives when they all go bad simultaneously are astronomically low, but they're still not '0'.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I put a hard drive I had upgraded from in an external enclosure with an USB connection.
I use SyncToy from MS to synch my stuff to the external drive.
Works well for me.
If you're not a programmer type, then you can use it e.g. through http://www.jungledisk.com/. It'll cost you (for 30GB) $5 a year, but you have an off-site acessable from everywhere, reliable backup.
i let Retrospect do automated incremental backups twice a week, to a NAS RAID 5 - this is protection against accidentally deleting files, or disk failure in our PCs. the NAS is in the same room as the PCs, so it doesn't help against fire or theft, obviously.
monthly, i do a full backup to DVDs with Nero. then i take those DVDs to work with me and stick them in my desk. if i had the time, i'd do this weekly. but it takes hours and i have to be there to swap DVDs. maybe i should do the full back up to an external HD...
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
Well, let's start with a few things like causes:
1. User error, in particular:
1a. I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing error, aka luser error
1b. I-know-what-I'm-doing error, aka admin/poweruser error
2. Software issues
2a. Corrupted files
2b. Viruses
3. Hardware breakdown
3a. Disk failure
3b. Short circuit, controller failure, leaky water cooling taking out multiple disks
4. Crisis
4a. Your house burning down
4b. Break-in
Then there's the importance of data, at least three:
1. Personal/Important things
2. A-lot-of-work things (like a ripped CD collection, recreatable but much work)
3. Bulk data
Back-up methods:
1. In-machine backup (RAID)
2. Near-line backup (DVD/external disk)
3. Offsite backup (DVD/external disk)
4. Network backup
5. Internet backup
The thing is, you don't manage to serve every need at once. Many here talk about external disks. I remember a slashdot post from a previous discussion, where the burglar had kindly taken the PC as well as the external disk lying nearby. Or if the house burns, it all burns. Yes, it sucks bigtime in any case, but at least now your digicam photos can survive. One of the hardest things about it, from what I've understood is that your past is pretty much erased. Clothes, furniture, souvenirs and trinkets.
Another issue is the time between you discover the problem and the error occurred. Suddenly notice you must have deleted that important folder by accident, or it's been eaten by filesystem corruption, or bad sectors (yes, they get remapped, no they don't always manage to rescue the data). Or you want to return your system to a virus-free state. Good luck doing that with your daily sync'ing backup to an external HDD.
Part of it is also the effort just actually doing it, even if it's just "One push" if you're going to hide it/put it in a fire safe/take it offsite. I would prefer having an automated network backup run, but my network stretches like 5 meters and my Internet connection is too slow. Some of the really important stuff(tm) could go over the Internet, but not all my bulk data. Plus, these should have more versions too. Overall, I find making a good backup solution is far from trivial.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't think it's any different than if you were recording shows to VHS tape and saving them. That there is no discussion of this in the Sony Betamax case, has let the issue remain basically open and up for debate (SONY CORP. OF AMER. v. UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC., 464 U.S. 417 (1984)). Although the case doesn't say anything explicitly (based on my reading) about tape "librarying," it certainly does acknowledge that it exists, and IIRC some guy with a substantial library of tapes was hauled in to testify during the proceedings. That the court ruled in favor of Sony even though they knew librarying existed as a widespread practice, seems to be at least a small nod in favor.
3 01206-1.html
It seems to me that librarying could be easily interpreted as just time-shifting of an arbitrary duration, as long as the works are not further copied. On the other hand, in the ruling, there is a mention of 'time shifting' being the recording of a program at one time, and then watching it a single time later on. Almost as if the playback was a destructive process, and consumed the recording while doing it. However, this is obviously not the case, and any time-shifting technology inherently gives you the ability to watch a recorded program more than once, which really blows away the single-playback test for time shifting.
What's really interesting is that if you read the footnotes in the opinion, there is a sentence which reads: "To the extent that this practice involves librarying, it is addressed in section V. C., infra." (footnote 39) But -- and this is the best part -- there is no section V.C. in the ruling. Section IV has subsections A through B, but no C. Section V doesn't have any subsections at all. It's as if they wrote a section of the opinion to cover home librarying, but then removed it at the last minute, without even updating the footnotes.
This leaves it in a grey area, and to the best of my knowledge there's never been a straightforward test of whether or not librarying for personal use only (without copying or sharing) is infringement. As the Sony case doesn't specify a length of time that a recording can be shifted, I think it could be argued that it's allowed (provided you can pass the other Fair Use tests). Of course, all this is becoming less and less relevant with the DMCA and DRM; there is no Fair Use exemption to the DMCA (although there is one for "interoperability"), so in today's climate, the Sony case wouldn't have even happened -- thus it's hard to extend the ruling too far into the present and future.
At any rate, given the current murkiness of copyright and Fair Use law, I think an unshared archive of legally recorded OTA programs is probably the least of anyone's potential worries at this point. If that's the only thing you have on your computer or your house that might possibly be in violation, you lead either a very virtuous or very boring life.
If you want to read a rather lengthy discussion of the issue, wherein some fairly well-educated (and some not so much) slug it out, it's been beaten to a bloody pulp and then some over at AVS Forums: http://archive.avsforum.com/avs-vb/history/topic/
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What are you going to do when you've essentially synced a corrupt file, which overwrites your working backup file without you knowing? Aaah, that's why the REALLY important stuff needs incremental backups. Retrospect does this as long as you don't do a recycle backup. Having had a file go bad and overwrite the one in the backup set recently, I know for a fact that this can happen.
If you code, do content creation stuff, etc. I highly recommend you do not recycle your storage space for these backups if at all possible. If it isn't possible, I'd either stagger two backup sets and let one be a little stale, or do what I'm going to start doing for the big stuff. Keep swapping external drives to maintain two sets and burn off semianually so that hopefully you'll wind up with a good copy of your old files in the event that part of the disk goes just bad enough to appear to function, or a file gets corrupted by a bad write.
I recently discovered that my DLT backups of a 100GB database could not be read consistently, so I decided to write them to DVD.
I am lucky enough that 7-Zip is able to compress the entire database down to under 8GB, which fits on a dual-layer disc.
If I had not been so lucky, what I was planning to do was a Bourne-shell FOR loop that moved over all files in a directory tree, calling ln to make a hard link in a backup tree, while constantly testing the output of du in the backup tree (backing off the last file when the threshold was exceeded). Then simply burn the backup tree, erase it, then continue. The backup tree would consume no extra disk space in this scenario.
All of these tools are available on NT. I've downloaded growisofs, and a real ln for ntfs is in the unxutils.sourceforge.net collection, which also includes a zshell.
In a domain environment, wholes drives are default shared as C$, etc. For your situation, you could just manually share the entire drive and then pick and chose what to back up in BackupPC or just use you folder shares (which is what I do). I have a media share for movies, music, etc. and a document share for all my important files. I run out of a VMWare image that I have backed up to a DVD so if the whole system dies, I just copy the image back and restore the data. I had an electrical outtage and was able to pop this into a virtual machine on my laptop in about 20 minutes when I needed the system up immediately and not wait for the power company (gotta love laptops during a thunderstorm ;-). The link to the software I provided in the grandfather post has excellent documentation. If you want something a bit more polished for home use, check out some of the for-pay offerings from Acronis, another company with exceptional support.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
For home users we can rule out all the expensive stuff like LTO3/LTO3, SDLT which backupexec, which has become pretty much standard in business.
I found by administering small networks, the most reliable backup tool in Windows is Robocopy. It's a neat program you can download from Microsoft as part of the XP support tool or the W2K3 resource kit. It's a command line utility so you can you use inside a small script, then add it to your scheduled tasks.
Here's what you could do: buy one or even better, two, cheap removable hard-drives. Then schedule robocopy to make incremental backup every day sometime at noon or during the nite to your removable drive. Then everyweek, change drive and put it in a safe place in your house.
That's only good for files, if you want to backup your system state then you'll have to use the backup tool in accessories. But keep in mind at home probably the most important stuff to backup is the email folder, address book, some documents, and very important all pictures (all that's in c:\documents and settings...)!
I guess that's what everybody "should" do.
I liked what I saw during the keynote presentation of OSX Leopard. I'm sure you all heard or read about the new app called "time machine" that was shown to do it all for u. Neither Vista nor Leopard will really solve the problem, but I think it will make it easier to implement cheap reliable solutions.
are you opposed to an internet based solution? i believe this was /.ed recently:
http://www.carbonite.com/
unlimited storage for $5 / month.
you'll be clogging the internet tubes though...
Start Programs Accessories System Tools Backup I know that was a little hard to find, but it is there
External hard drive with syncback SE by 2brightsparks. http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbse.html Syncback is a SOLID program that you set up to either do a backup or synchronize - I think they have a FREE version, too. I choose to synchronize so it's a mirror image of my music directories. You can set it up to sync/backup on a timed schedule. It really is the BEST solution. Syncback also allows FTP backup/sync. I'm currently in Germany and have a computer in the USA set up to sync with. No compression. SWEET! I also back up with DAT tape and use STOMP PCbackup program. But it's not nearly as elegant as the hard drive with syncback. These external hard drives are now cheap enough and reliable enough to be your secondary storage. I tried DVDs for a while but was not impressed with the final product. You still have to sit there and feed your burner DVDs. The FTP sync works so well, I haven't done the DAT backup in a couple of months!
RAID-5 protection for single drive failure isn't without points of failure. The average home user would probably need some training to be able to manage one effectively for disaster-recovery purposes.
I would highly recommend that anyone thinking of implementing one for the first time first read up on the hardware and drivers they intend to use. Next, after purchase & initial install, they should tranfer a bunch of test files & practice a rebuild by simulating a drive going bad (take 1 drive out, erase everything on it from another machine, put it back in and rebuild the array).
I found out the hard way that it's quite easy to end up with a bunch of cross-linked files if you botch a rebuild. At that point, you're basically hosed. My ASUS mobo has built-in nVidia RAID-5, and after my first rebuild about 60% of the original files were just missing. Running chkdisk on it restored the files, but about 50% of the restored files (so 30% of all the original files) were corrupted with bad clusters.
Also, a 1TB RAID-5 will show marked performance degredation if it's used heavily & not defragged regularly. A defrag operation can take 24 hours plus to complete on a terabyte filesystem if not run nightly.
I see Maxtor offers some pretty good sized drives for the OneTouch backup system; you can currently do a 500Gb setup @ less than $0.55/Gb, which ain't half bad. For content other than large media files, rotating a couple separate external devices like this would make for a pretty effective and secure backup strategy. If the data is sensitive, just TrueCrypt ( http://www.truecrypt.org/ ) the drives first thing.
Pi Ran Out
I keep my precious collection of Norwegian pop music mp3s under my tinfoil hat in my backyard bomb shelter.
I just bought two 120gb hard drives and would like to put those in my server, one being a backup to the other and be bootable in case of a failure. It's just a standard, older PC I had laying around the house (450mhz AMD, 512mb of RAM, IDE, two USB ports). I'd really like to stick with both drives being in the case rather than a portable drive solution.
Just for clarification, I don't need/want compression, I just want to be able to boot to the other drive if the first one fails. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Content Management System: A pretentious way of saying "text editor."
DriveXML does what I need it to do. Not entirely human readable files but since it uses xml they should be extractable but I haven't looked too hard into it, I use it to backup an image of the drive. You can burn to DVD and create a bootable CD to restore to the system drive. And it's free. I personally use it to create an image to an external NAS drive.
http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm
Instead, I have a 250GB Buffalo LinkStation which is used as a common fileserver for music as well as a backup server for Ghost and DriveImage images and compressed filesystems in other formats, and I have a 250GB Buffalo DriveStation (a fanless external USB drive) plugged into the LinkStation and dedicated as a backup device for the LinkStation.
.tgz files to the LS, and back the LS itself up to the DS every week or so (it takes me about 40 hours to do a LS->DS backup right now).
That way, I can back up my various OS partitions via Ghost or DriveImage and store them on the LS, back up data files and directory trees as ZIP or
Even with my small LAN, DVDs would be too cumbersome.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Faubackup. Or perhaps dirvish. Either one works on Linux, and both are are pretty easy to use if you can write simple bash shell scripts. In the case of faubackup (http://faubackup.sourceforge.net/), the backups are made to disk and can be run automatically with crontab. If you combine faubackup with rsync, you can even make automatic backups to other hosts over the Internet. Dirvish also makes backups to disk, but doesn't require rsync for the remote stuff (http://www.dirvish.org/).
However, if you're hoping to find something elegant, reliable & cheap (free) for Windows, I don't think that exists. The Windows world is awash with expensive commercial backup solutions, almost always involving expensive hardware (tapes, yuk). The best way to backup Windows is... by using Linux. If there are any free Windows solutions, I doubt that they can hold a candle to the two mentioned above.
I work in a call center, and have worked with customers through tragic cases of data loss. It is no different in the home. There are two prime threats to data: hard drive failure, and theft or destruction of the "office" space. The first can be guarded against by making a local copy of the data in any way. The second requires an offsite backup. I have been investigating online backups (which protect against both threats), and have found two that are remarkable:
http://www.carbonite.com/ - Unlimited backup for $5/mo, targetted for the home user
http://www.datadepositbox.com/ - cheap backups for $1/MB/mo, targetted for businesses
Both of these can be fully automated for continuous online backup. Of course, broadband is ideal, but they do work over a dialup, it would just have to be on a lot (overnight?). And no, I have no relationship with these companies. I have tested datadepositbox, and it is amazing, but a little pricier. A friend is trying carbonite, and it looks very promising. I believe both Google and Microsoft are positioning themselves to provide free or very cheap online backup in the future. Keep an eye on this technology.
I had a similar problem to the OP except mine was that I lacked the constitution to back up on a regular basis and when I did back up, it was rarely to the same place twice. This resulted in many partial backups and differing versions of the same file which got confusing and messy. My solution was to buy my buddy's old 1ghz AMD Thunderbird, a nice fat hard drive and install Linux making sure Samba was included. Three times a week (read: crontab), the Linux box in my closet runs a script (I don't guarantee linked is bug free) that uses smbclient to log into my WinXP machine. Now, my script TARs all the files, but it could be easily rewritten to simply copy.
For windows users it can be a pain to backup on to a single file (or fileset). Here are a few approaches that worked for me on Windows: Norton Ghost Network or Enterprise Edition, Restrospect Workstation(this is my best recommendation for user friendly methods), Acronis Trueimage Workstation(with Universal Restore component), Windows 2000 Backup Utility included in Windows 2000(a little awkward but works well), xcopy, Nero. Acronis TruImage Workstation(with Universal Restore Component) is one of my top choices for "users" because it has a easy to use wizard wrapper around the MS syspart tool in Windows to create a "bare metal" backup which can be transfered to a new computer easily as well as make file backups to a number of medias while the OS is running. Retrospect also works well but I didn't see any tools for imaging an OS, bare-metal or otherwise.
Now to be clear I do not consider a second drive or RAID a backup solution, only protection against defective/worn hardware. The reason is that if an electrical problem, virus or accidental file destruction occurs the file would not be protected. A true backup needs to be entirely separate from the system being backed up. DVDs fit this criteria (slow to write, fast to retrieve) but are not ideal because contrary to popular belief, their shelf life is 2-5 years (according to an article by IBM) max depending on quality of DVD in use. Convenient, but not ideal. A Hard drive in my experience lasts between 2-10 years. USB enclosures make this very easy and notebook drives/usb enclosures make this very portable. Tapes have a shelf life of up to 10 years, although its slow.(I've heard some say 30 but what home user has a controlled environment). USB Sticks (Flsh memory) are fast to write and retrieve but I believe they degrade per write more rapidly than Tapes or Hard drives. But all of these would qualify as a true backup because they can be contained separately. For home users I suggest either a USB Enclosure for a hard drive(replace every 3-4 years recommended) or Tape (DAT 72 is the best for the money these days and backwards compatible with DDS-4). There are SATA DAT Tape drives available so SCSI controllers are less of a concern now. I don't recommend DVD's as 2 years later you may be in for a nasty surprise on an attempt to retrieve.
The other thing for all users (business and home) to keep in mind: They should have TWO kinds of backups: File backups (incremental) and OS image backups. The reason for the OS image backup (or drive image) is that even if your essential files are saved, your application installation files/dependencies may not. Many files cannot be backed up properly because an active process has ownership of them while the OS is running. So for a TRUE OS backup, a separate boot CD or USB disk should be creaetd (Norton Ghost, Acronis TrueImage (really friendly for this) or "Recovery Is Possible" (RIP, a free open source linux based recovery tool you burn to a separate CD) all have tools to do this. A image backup (again done with a separate boot disk) should be done once all applications you require are installed, or you add a new application. This way should data on your hard drive be destroyed, you can easily restore your OS and all its application installs, logs and user dat files in one step. Otherwise it can take HOURS to do a new setup (OS install, drives, applications, tweaking settings...)
Hope this helps everyone.
PS: I'll check out Bacula, its not for general home users, but it looks good for techies.
PPS: RIP (Recovery is possible) has been great for rescuing data from dying hard drives when windows couldn't read the data. Just in case a users didn't do their backups in time and wants to avoid paying hundreds of dollars to recover the data. Just do a new image of the bad drive using the RIP tools, and read the files off the new drive.
'Imagination is more important than knowledge' - Einstien
Mozy offers 2Gb free. So, just burn a DVD (or how ever many you need) of the large files you have that don't change every day.... and setup Mozy to backup the files you actually are changing frequently.... documents, emails, current photos, etc.
FYI.... I am a long-time Linux user who had the misfortunate of a HD crash last month. I didn't have everything I needed backed up because I didn't feel like taking the time to set it up. Yes, I know.... bad, bad, bad... However, with Mozy it was a no-brainer. Your grandparents could use it.
I think Amazon's S3 service offers a similar thing, but I have not looked into it.
http://www.k5n.us
It's a little clunky and awkward, but at least I can span tapes.
I have an 80gb disk, plus a 160gb, so it takes a while. Everything else is on one of the two RAID arrays on the SuSE box (running Samba) in the same room.
Sure, tape is hopelessly archaic and slow, but I can take a small box of DAT tapes to my mom's house or work and sleep a little more soundly. I have a dual layer DVD writer too, but that's still only, what, 8gb nominal, vs. 25gb or so I get with compression on the DAT tapes.
I also back up to DLT tapes too, I have 4 drives (3 that work well) but that requires SCSI differential, and I only have one card that does that, and there's not many free slots in other machines to transfer the card from machine to machine. And DLT tapes are bulky.
If your time is worth £0.00 (or $0.00) then you can spend hours swapping out DVDs if you want.
but for most every Home User I know, they don't want to bother with that.
they generally don't think about Backups until it is too late, then they will pay ANYTHING to get their PRICELESS stuff back!
No one I know places any "value" on their Data until it is Lost.
Cost of Media is not really a factor. Ease of Use and Transparency is.
I like microcars
There're so many "eBay retailers" these days it's getting pretty tough to find something that someone is selling that they've used and are tired of, etc.
In general terms, DeltaCopy is an open source, fast incremental backup program. Let's say you have to backup one file that is 500 MB every night. A normal file copy would copy the entire file even if a few bytes have changed. DeltaCopy, on the other hand, would only copy the part of file that has actually been modified. This reduces the data transfer to just a small fraction of 500 MB saving time and network bandwidth. In technical terms, DeltaCopy is a "Windows Friendly" wrapper around the Rsync program, currently maintained by Wayne Davison. "rsync" is primarily designed for Unix/Linux/BSD systems. Although ports are available for Windows, they typicall require downloading Cygwin libraries and manual configuration.
http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp
SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System) monitoring is built into nearly all modern [S|P]ATA and SCSI drives. The drive itself watches trends in bad sectors, spin-up time, internal temperature, a dozen parameters that allow the drive itself to predict failure.
At a minimum, turn on the SMART check in your BIOS-- at least your machine will run a basic health check at boot-up. I've been alerted to an incipient failure at least once that way. But some of us seldom boot our boxes.
Better to use a tool like SmartMonTools http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools which can run on most Linux distros and Winders too. It can run scheduled self-tests, log errors, send emails or console alerts, and keep you on top of how your drives are feeling. It can even reach through a 3Ware raid card and query individual drives. Does ATA, SATA, SCSI, or devices that emulate them.
Be safe!
I believe the backup software that comes with Nero will do what you are asking (although I'd suggest the external drive option myself).
I'm not positive if it stores the data without any wrapper -- it's been a while. But I *think* it will. I know it'll let you backup to multiple disks if needed.
Is anyone using an online service to do backups (like Amazon's S3 service?)? I wonder how it compares price wise to DVDs or external hard drives.
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
Here's the point I think the other poster meant:
RAID0 is striping. So every other chunk of your data is on each disk - so every file is on every disk. So you are essentially guaranteed that any time 1 disk goes bad your entire array is useless - COMPLETELY useless. Lose 1/4 of the drives, lose 100% of the data.
Unless you have an extreme need for contiguous, single file read/write speed, RAID0 is a poor choice. (For many asychronous reads a bunch of drives with your data randomly split between them is much more efficient in the average case, because seeks are much more costly than most reads. Many RAID1 implementations will choose to read from whichever drive is less utilized, so for pure asynch read-speed RAID1 is often best.)
HOWEVER, if all you have is concatenated drives - where the first part of your virtual drive is on the first physical drive, and the second part on the second one - then you skip the giant reliability disadvantage of RAID0. Essentially you then have a scenario where a single drive failure will most likely only take out its fraction of your data. (After some fun with fsck and some luck on the fs level) Lose 1/4 of your drives, lose 1/4 of your data. I can see being comfortable with this scenario.
Now, if you concat'd your drives using LVM, that's what you've got. Based on your original post, I think you did this. That is not RAID0.
So I think you're ok with having only one copy of the data, you probably have LVM concat, and that's fine.
The OP was trying to point out that for any data you even slightly care about RAID0 is a poor choice compared to meerly concating it.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
I back up to Jungle Disk, a free slick front-end for Amazon S3 that lets you use it as a disk drive. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and there's GPL'd code that lets other people develop alternative compatible front-ends.
Cost: $0.15 / gigabyte, and my data is replicated in several datacenters on more than one continent.
I have two HD's and use Abakt (http://www.xs4all.nl/~edienske/abakt/index.html) to run an automated diff backup of "My Documents" from the main HD to the backup HD. Setup a backup profile, then you can run Abakt from command line (so a simple batch file to start, run a profile, and close) is very simple. ex. "C:\Program Files\Abakt\Abakt.exe" -b -x "C:\Documents and Settings\xuser\Application Data\Abakt\Profiles\Mydocs.abp" I like simple and autpmated. Add I run SuSE 10 on the second drive so if WinXP blows out I, boot to SuSe and still access web, doc, e-mail (I use Open Office). Anyway .. funny name..good software
Two wrongs don't make a right - but two do's make a dodo
NTBackup works just fine, it just doesn't have good reporting for the home user. Don't try and backup to CD or DVD because you just never remember on a weekly/monthly basis. External/Network hard drive is the proper place to backup your files. My recommendation for backup software would be Norton Ghost or Aronis TrueImage. These are imaging programs which provide file backup as well. Very easy and can restore your file, PROGRAMS, OPERATING SYSTEM, and SETTINGS. Only imaging can make recovery easy.
When talking about Backups in a discussion about backups, it referes to something you will use to restore a system. usually compressed into a format only extractable by a specific piece of software.
It is neccessary to be pendantic in this conversation so when someone does advise on his issue, they advise soemthing that does a complete copy of the structure in a format that is readable by the OS 'nativly'. As an example of my point: Had this been a discussion on operating systems design, I wouldn't have used the term 'natively' has it ahs a specific meaning, as well as some general meaning.
Language, eh?
I minor nitpic that usually doesn't matter, but as someone who has work in the technology, I can assure you that being clear can be critical.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
SCSI controllers are cheep cheep on Ebay and etc. I have about 6 laying around-- some people gave me. Ok, so only the PCI bus types count, and only the ones that can handle wide devices, but still, I've gotten 4 or 5 cheap or free. SCSI is easy to work with, especially if you haunt the swaps like I do where SCSI cards and cables show up cheap all the time.
Get TrueImage from Acronis.
It started out as a drive imaging solution that's much more elegant than ghost. Now it has scheduling, can backup files only, can do incremental's, etc. It's very easy to use and supports everything (usb drives, dvd burning, network drives, etc). If you have a backed up image on a network drive you can boot off it's boot cd to restore the image - actually you can create from the boot cd too. I think you can get it at newegg.com for around $35.
I don't know about Windows, but with Macintosh, (10.4) I have it setup with a internal HD in an external enclosure, then have the a free program made by Lacie called SilverBackup (or something like that). With my Windows systems, I manually back it up with an external hd. Honestly, if your on windows or linux, you are either knowledgeable enough to manually backup or deserve to manually backup.
Even though StandardDeviant may have gotten a bit carried away. It's obvious that the maxtor dudes are just using this as an advertisement. You'll even notice that all the accounts that posted how *great* this drive is supposed to be, were created today!
Call me a cynic, but I find it hard to believe that so many slashdot readers suddenly decided they had to register just to proclaim the wonders of a certain external hard drive.
Quantum Physics a.k.a. sub-molecular statistics
I found out backups should be something that automagically happens. Users forget otherwise.
Here's a great article about setting up automated backups for small networks.
Automated distributed backup
If you are backing up stuff you want to keep, dvd-r is the WRONG solution with an archival life somewhere between 3 and 5 years you are more likely to come back to a coaster collection than a backup.
Acronis True Image does the same thing for Windows. I like it a lot.
http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATICW/
It seems people are quick to dismiss RAID as part of a backup solution because it doesn't solve all the problems by itself. While RAID can protect against hard drive failure (which, for whatever little it's worth as a single data point, is the only means by which I've ever lost personal data), it does nothing to shield the file system. However, snapshots can save state before a virus attack, recycle bins can restore files deleted by mistake, and user/group level share permissions can make sure your kid can't even see your data, let along clear it out to make room for his music. All these features are so common you can find them in off-the-shelf products, like Infrant's ReadyNAS. The result is something reliable enough that I would trust my music and movies to it (and the media performance boost is nice).
Of course flood/theft/fire can easily wipe this all away. I take that risk, knowing I'll be looking for my boxes of CDs and DVDs when it happens. But any data for work will also be on one of my laptops, which I backup to a NAS using Acronis True Image. This way, if a laptop is stolen, I can be up and running the next day. My largest laptop drive is only 120 GB, so this wouldn't be a good idea for all my data -- just what I need to do my job.
If both laptop and NAS were stolen, I'd be in a bit more trouble. So all critical legal and financial data is on a tiny 1 GB slice of remote network storage.
I see backups as a balancing act between the importance of various pieces of data and the reliability and cost of various technologies. This is why there is no "perfect backup solution", and why expecting a single product or technology to satisfy all backup needs is just absurd.
I don't know about you, but $1 per megabyte per month is not cheap; that's $1,000 (or $1024 if they consider a gigabyte 1,000 meg) per GB, PER MONTH, and is more than the cost of storing on Floppy Disk!
Presumably you mean $1 per GB per month, which is $12 per MB per year. Right now, 500 MB hard drives retail - that's retail mind you, not wholesale - for around $350. That puts the retail cost of drives at less than $1 per megabyte. Now, presume that you need eight drives to provide quad raid reliability, and eight separate machines cost as much as the drives, plus about $1000 a month in electricity, plus, $2000 a month for the internet connection and co-location charges, so to provide, say twenty terabytes of space, 350*400 (350*5*80)+ (24000*3) (Drives have about a 3-year warranty), means to provide 20TB of space over 3 years means it will cost the provider about $5 per GB over 3 years, to which they will charge $36. Nice work if you can get it.
Recommendation 1
Buy a 500gb drive (or whatever size you think you need) for $350. Buy an external USB hard drive case for about $40. For $390 you now have a 500gb backup drive that you can now just use drag and drop to copy files to or from.
Recommendation 2
Buy a second (used) computer or use a spare if you have one, and have it simply act as a file server, and have it grab new files off other machines on your network. Or set the new machine up with Linux, and install Amanda, an open-source backup utility and have it automatically backup new files.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
I have a CD burner program that works just fine. Lots of people do. I suppose if I were to ever buy a DVD-writable drive, I could use it with that. But DVDs are totally impractical for backups of today's systems holding multimedia, because they're way, way too small.
I miss the days when a typical (or even expensive) drive could be backed up to a single $12 tape. If you spend $800 on a hard drive, you could then also spend $600 on a tape drive that used $12 tapes that could back it up.
These days, that means we need about 300 Gigabytes on a single inexpensive tape, and really, it would be nice if it were about 4 times that size. I don't see anything like that for sale.
Tape technology didn't keep up, and no rival alternative stepped up to the plate either. While hard disk manufacturers were cranking the densities way up and putting them out in such numbers that they remained cheap, nothing much happened with tape. Yeah, I've seen a few tape solutions that had fairly large capacities, but they still weren't big enough and more importantly, they are bloody expensive. So sad.
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For files/folders, consider http://www.2brightsparks.com/ - SyncBack.
For imaging the machine, consider http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm - DriveImage XML. Compare to Ghost/Acronis True Image. Makes images from within Windows. Also runnable from a http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ - Bart PE disk as a plug in/module for restores.
I Image my machine every night and keep 3 nights of backups. This happens at 2am to a USB drive via the following batch file scheduled via Windows Task Scheduler:
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As you've probably been able to deduce by now, there are many different backup 'solutions'. I think the best advice for you is to learn from those of us who have a system similar to yours and who have been through this problem over and over again and finally settled on a method that works but doesn't take a degree in IT to implement and use. I could give you a detailed history of all the various things I've tried and rejected over the years, but I won't waste your time with that. First of all, if you've been at this for any length of time, you will have found that CDs or DVDs are definitely not the way to go for reasons too numerous to expound upon in this comment. It really boils down to a matter of statistics and also how much time and energy you're willing to devote to your particular backup needs. You need to answer the question of exactly what do you need to back up. I think most home users would be well advised to create a seperate partition on their hard drive and write all data files to that partition, leaving the main partition strickly for executables and other system files. That in itself is a form of backup in that if your sytem crashes badly enough, even a destructive reinstall can be performed without affecting your data residing on the data partition. It should be mentioned here that part of that data that you've put on the data partition could be the software installation files for applications that you may have a hard time finding and downloading off the net again. My second recommendation is to get yourself an external hard drive dedicated to containing copies of files from your main drive's data partition. How you decide to effect that copying operation is a function of how important you feel it is to keep that data timely. In other words, could you live with the loss of the previous week's changes? That kind of question determines your backup scheduling. You can use any number of backup programs, or you can use XCOPY or XXCOPY via a batch file, or if you feel it necessary or desirable, you can use a compression program. In any case, once the initial copies are put on the external drive, it's a simple matter of selecting the proper arguments for those programs such that only new and changed data is written from your data partition to the external drive. All those high-powered syncing and mirroring programs and RAID are history with me. I settled for the simple and it works well.
Heard any good sigs lately?
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You probably only have a few directories where you keep the files you need to back up.
I just use Ahead Nero, and burn a cd. drag over the directories I want,and away we go. Of course, I only have about 3 CD's worth of data that I need. You may have more. I don't consider MP3's to be something I want to keep.
If you need more, consider a DVD burner.
I tried using that program and about 4 others to do backups on windows. All of them were flawed in one way or another, until I found SyncBack. I have never had a problem with that, it always finds the changed files and backs them up. Using SyncToy I was never sure if it was really getting the right files or not.
So, every night on the various workstations (for now mine and my wife's boxes - both running Linux) I have a cron job that backs up the "important" portions of the home directories - for us, this includes the ~/.mozilla directory as well as various subdirs under ~/data (and in my case, my
At 6am, on the fileserver, a cron job runs a similar task, but in this case it copies from the backup areas on the mounted SMB home shares to a central staging area. It also copies various work directories on the server - mainly backing up webserver (apache) directories, and several config files for apache and mysql, as well as a backup dump of the mysql DB. Once all of this is in the staging area, it uses mkisofs to build an ISO9660 image of the staging area. It names this file in a certain manner, then copies it to a public SMB share under
This system has served me well for about a year now. I have had to make a few tweaks and changes over time (recently caught an issue that was causing my backup images to grow by 5 meg each week - turned out to be a
I store the ISO image CDs in a CD binder that holds around 40 or so CDs - when it is full, the "first" one is taken out and put on a spindle in storage, all of them shift upward, and the new one is put at the tail (LIFO? FILO?) - I figure when the spindle is full, it will go into "archival" storage to collect dust. In a way, I can in theory go back for years to grab old images if I ever need to - I haven't yet, though. When a CD isn't big enough (I am at about 300MB on my images so far), I can switch to DVDs or span CDs or something.
I don't think this is the perfect backup solution (for home, and definitely not for business), and if I wish I had something different (I have given thought to mirroring the images to a USB drive hanging off the server as more insurance). However, it is better than nothing at all, and has proved itself in an emergency to boot, plus it didn't cost me a dime (just many hours of tweaking).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Personally I've just subscribed to Altexa Backup http://www.altexa.com/ - they have a nice $1 per GB per month setup which is fine for me
At work we've got a 80/160 Gig tape drive along with a 10 disk changer. That's about 1.5 teras. Just pick some backup software and check the hardware compatibility list and find something in your price range. Fwiw, we're switching to a hard drive backup system.
Lets look at the typical PC home user (like my father, who can't copy/paste) They don't know how to burn a CD They don't know what a flash drive is They don't know the difference between an iPod and any other player They don't know about megabytes or gigaherts or RAM.. the PC just magically works They use Internet Explorer They click "OK" on all those tricky IE pop-ups, unknowingly installing malware to their system (which they don't know how to remove) They do not know shit about computers basically. Is it suprising they can't back up all their shit?
(I have used this method)
THE SITUATION:
/home is on a 350GB disk.
/home partition on the SuSE machine nightly with the PPRO using cron and rsync. The PPRO has a backup_user with ssh set to use an ssh key that the backup_user on the SuSE pc owns. The backup_user on the SuSE machine runs one of two very simple scripts depending on what day it is:
/home ./ backup_user@192.168.1.50:/home/backups/backup_1
/home ./ backup_user@192.168.1.50:/home/backups/backup_2
You WILL experience a disk crash. Don't kid yourself, it will happen. I have had several crash on me over the years.
Currently my wife has about 3GB of stuff on her WinXP PC that she doesn't want to loose.
I have about 30GB of stuff on my SuSE Linux PC that I don't want to loose. These are mostly family photos and several "reference" VMWare machines that I clone every time I want to create a working VMWare machine for my test lab.
My kids have about 3GB of stuff spread across both PC's that they don't want to loose.
I also have an old Compaq server with about a half of a T of SCSI disks. I picked this up for free because it is a PPro 200 and considered worthless. It runs CentOS (based on RedHat) just fine.
First off, there is no point in saving the OS or the programs. Everything on the XP machine is licensed and I made sure to save the install CD's. Everything on the SuSE and CentOS machines is of course avalable on-line. I do keep a fairly recent set of install disks and do a test install on a VMWare machine just to be sure that they are good. Reinstalling is a pain in the neck but really it only takes a day or so.(including updates and such)
The XP machine has a single 120GB disk.
The SuSE machine has 2 disks. This is not RAID, / is on a 250GB disk and
THE CURRENT SOLUTION:
All family members have a "network drive" configured on the XP machine. This is actually just a SAMBA mounted directory under their home dir on the SuSE machine. They have been drilled to put everything they value on the XP machine into their "Network Documents" folder. (Since I don't trust them to remember this, I also go through their home dir's on the XP machine and copy things over for them about once a week.)
I sync the
#!/bin/bash
cd
rsync -avz
or
#!/bin/bash
cd
rsync -avz
The first time this runs it takes a LOONNNNGGG time (100mb network) but after that it only takes a minute to update files that have been added or changed. User content is actually a very small part of the stuff we save on our PC's. Even if you type all day you have only created a couple of MB's of new files.
THE FUTURE:
If my house burns down I will still loose everything. I have about 100MB of on-line disk space that my ISP gave me but this is not enough. My current plan is to either rent several GB of on-line storage or to put a linux storage server at my brother-in-laws house. I have already put a linux firewall in for him. He is willing to let me store stuff there as long as I set backup space for him and his family. I will probably also rsync his stuff back to my network. I have already tried a small test backup to my ISP. Rsync across the internet is slow but if it happens automatically at 2:00am it doesn't matter and as I said earlier there really isn't that much of a change from day to day. If I do the first rsync on my network and then take the server to his it will be just fine.
Every wrong attempt discarded is a step forward - T. Edison
My wife and I share a home office. Each of us has a Windows XP machine. (I also have a Mac and a couple Linux boxes on a KVM switch) We have a wired network. There is an old Celeron machine in our "backroom" that runs XP Pro and has a 160 Gig HD. Attached to that machine via USB is an external 160 Gig hard drive.
Each of us runs a program called SmartSynch. On my machine it does a back up of files that have changed each night at Midnight. One hers, since she's a writer and does a large volume of work during the day, it does hourly similar backups to the backroom machine. At 2 am, the backroom machine backs up changed files to the USB drive. Recently I added an additional online backup using Carbonite.com. I'm impressed with that so far.
We've been using this system for about 2 years now and it's worked just fine. Restoring files is easy since they are stored as actual non-compressed copies of the files on our desktops. It's not fancy, but it's not expensive either. The key to any backup system is that you MUST do the backups. In our case, it's automatic, a big plus.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Now how's that for irony?
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Hideous. It won't handle in-use files at all. It will back up shedloads of useless files that you probably don't want restored.
Although it is a one liner!
Try using MS-Backup. It will let you back everything to file (including system-state) and it will be readable from anywhere, and it hooks into scheduled tasks without any problems so you can fire-and-forget.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Create a big tar (or .bkf) file of everything that you want to back up. Split that into smaller tar files using tar and "-L" and the amount you want to write to each disk, and then write the individual files to individual disks. Then at least check that you can actually read what you've written and take it somewhere else (off site).
The downside of this is that you'll probably need to restore from all the disks to restore one file, but the advantage is that you don't need to do the maths beforehand.
What about longish filemanes? I started using RAR to pack my backup when I discovered the Joliet filesystem used for CD-Rs does not support filenames longer than 64 characters. even if you name your files carefully, you'd always get these long filenames in places like the Favorites folder.
What filesystem is used for DVD-Rs?
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sudo apt-get install rar I had to do this to get rar files working in the default ubuntu archive manager. It probably needs universe or multiverse or whatever.
Backup these days is very very easy, Do you have an internet connection? Can you click a few buttons? Then you are set. There are many many online backup sites you can subscribe to. On of the best I know is http://www.backupnation.com/. Create your account there, download custom built backup program (very simple and small program), there you go. Now you have a backup, scheduled and automatic. Setup and forget until you need to restore. Come on guys at this time and age? Very easy.
Hardware: external hard drive attached to a linux machine via usb2, second external hard drive alternating with first for offsite backup.
p _system.writeback
Software: rsync, rdiff-backup, cryptsetup
Setup:
My two Mac OS X machines, along with anything else such as external website data files get backed up to the Linux machine via an hourly rsync. So if they're not on or accessible from the network when the rsync happens, they will be rsynced soon after they have been reconnected.
Every night, rdiff-backup onto the external hard disk (this gives me unlimited versioned backups). Every week or so, disconnect the hard disk from the linux box, move it to the car. Hook the other hard disk which was in the car to the linux box.
The external disks are set up with an encrypted file system (cryptsetup), so if the disks get stolen, the thief will not be able to easily read the data.
I wrote a script to do the backups and alert me to when the backup disk isn't mounted, the backups haven't been updated, or the backup media hasn't been changed for a while. I posted it on my website at http://yoderhome.com/e/blog/computitude/new_backu
This is certainly not a "computer novice" friendly solution. Then again, I have versioned backups, encrypted backup media, (reasonably) offsite backups, multiple-machine networked backup, and (mostly) automatic operation. So for me it was worth it.
If you want to compress in a non-proprietary format, use *.bzip2 format or *.gzip. There are two windows programs you can get:
;-)
For Gzip: http://www.gzip.org/
For BZip2: http://www.bzip.org/
This application below will compress into Bzip2 format is more user friendly, has a GUI and will split files for you:
http://www.7-zip.org/
Either one will give you compression that can be opened on ANY operating system including
Linux, Mac OS, windows, Unix.
here is a general reference page for MANY comrpession tools. Personally, I like the non-commercial ones myself.
http://datacompression.info/Zip.shtml
Hope this is useful for all..
'Imagination is more important than knowledge' - Einstien
...a program I wrote some 6 years ago for this purpose. It runs on anything that walks, quacks and looks like unix and maybe, just maybe you can get it to run on Windows...
George lives out on Sourceforge and has not been maintained (by me) in many years. It does need some maintenance by now I'm afraid...
Here's the blurb I wrote when I launched the thing:
What's the Problem?
The problem is simple. You just ripped all your CD's, albums, cassette tapes and 8-tracks to MP3 files, and have a stack of blank CD's waiting to be enscribed with the fruits of your labour. All that is left is to organize your files in such a way that albums do not get mixed up. And that artists are sorted, sort of. All the while keeping an eye on available CD-space, which you'd like to use efficiently. You can use one of the myriad of existing CD pre-mastering tools, but these tend to be less efficient for this specific job. What you really want is a tool which can deal with multiple sources and CD's at once, which knows how to select directories non-recursively (without including all subdirectories), which creates `cuesheets' (lists of files to include) for your favourite CD-mastering software. And it had better be free software, since you might like to learn a bit in the process by looking at the code (or teach the author of the program how to write better programs...).
A possible Solution
Presented with the aforementioned problems I sat down to hack up some Perl code to automate much of this process. A few cups of tea later, George was born. It did not have a name then, but it performed its tasks to satisfaction of the owner by scheduling a sizeable amount of CD's out of the scattered MP3-populations on various networked boxen. "Hmmm..." I thought, there's bound to be other people in a similar situation, having their files all around waiting for that `big cleanup' which for some reason gets postponed indefinitely. And since I've got this thing for Free Software, why not polish up this program a bit and release it to the ravenous masses on the 'Net? An since all good software has a name... George was born. There's nothing more to that name than a somewhat corresponding subset of characters, really.
Anatomy of George
* George is written in Perl. Perl works the way I do. It is convoluted, messy and noisy, but it produces results.
* The GUI-endowned version uses the Gnome libraries. And Gnome needs a lot more, like GTK and friends. It also uses the Glade-Perl extension, since this saves me from a lot of repetitive work. If you don't know Glade and you (intersted in) programming for GTK, try it. It is an interface builder for GTK (and Gnome) which allows you to cobble together an interface in a few minutes. And Glade-Perl in turn depends on GTK-Perl, also commonly known as gnome-perl (in the Gnome CVS repository) or perl-GTK. Get the latest version and save yourself some headaches...
* George is probably `Unix-only' (where the term 'Unix' is used for everything which looks, quacks and walks like a Unix. Linux is fine, so is FreeBSD or OpenBSD or Solaris). The command line version might work on Win32 (with some working version of Perl) as well. If I feel so inclined, I'll even combine both versions in one program (whee... something I should have done in the first place but remember, this was a simple hack...).
* George does not do its own premastering, nor does it directly control the CD-writer. For these purposes it relies on mkisofs and cdrecord. You can probably also use mkhybrid to create Mac CD's, but for lack of a Mac I hve not tried this. If you try this, you'll need to add some mkhybrid-specific flags to the preferences hash in George. You'll have to know some Perl to do that.
* George is licensed under the Gnu Public License. That means that George is what is called `Free Software'. You c
--frank[at]unternet.org
First let me warn you that I'm a bit biased on this topic (I'm an engineer who has worked on core components for a couple of the mainstream backup/disaster-recovery products out there, from competing companies). Also, my experience on this topic is limited to the Windows platforms.
I would recommend that you consider backup solutions that enable you to quickly recovery individual files, as well as to quickly recover from a full system meltdown (ie. a hard disk crash). In my mind there are currently only three products which can do this with any degree of reliability. They are (in no particular order):
1) Symantec's Ghost (for Desktops) and LiveState Recovery (for Servers)
2) StorageCraft's ShadowProtect
3) Acronis' True Image
These three products share several similar traits. They all create backup images files which represent the entire state of a logical volume's data, rather than backing up individual files themselves. This enables you to perform full volume restoration should a disaster occur, such as a hard drive failure. They also enable you to easily restore individual files by allowing you to mount/browse into the contents of a backup image file. They allow you to backup your volumes in a hot/in-use state, so you do not need to stop any of your work or close any of your applications when the backup is performed. They allow you to set up a backup schedule so that the backups are automated and no user intervention is required to ensure that backups are occurring. They allow you to perform "incremental backups" which means that when a backup occurs, it will only backup the changes which occurred since the previous backup. They all provide a bootable "recovery environment" CD which contains a bootable OS as well as tools that can be used to restore/recovery files and/or full volumes in the event that you are restoring to a machine which doesn't contain an OS, or if you are restoring an image file over your existing OS. They are all "enterprise ready" as they allow you to remotely manage large networks from one GUI console, contain scripting support, and are integrated with platform technologies (such as Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Service - more detail below).
I'll discuss how these products differ in their offerings of these features.
Hot Backups: This is probably the most important aspect of these products because this feature allows you to backup your machine with zero down time. You don't (at least you shouldn't - keep on reading) need to stop any of your applications in order to capture a good clean backup. This feature is made possible by a sophisticated "snapshot" device driver which can instantly capture the state of a logical volume at a specified time and expose this captured state to the backup software. Although Windows XP and 2003 ship with a built-in snapshot device driver (volsnap.sys), it is somewhat lacking in features (especially on XP) and alltogether absent on Windows 2000. Therefore all of these products give preference to a proprietary snapshot device driver. The snapshot device driver used in Symantec's products is licensed to Symantec from StorageCraft (see the copyright file properties of pqv2i.sys or symsnap.sys). StorageCraft of course uses its own snapshot device driver (albeit a newer and better version) in ShadowProtect. Acronis also has its own snapshot device driver. There is a significant difference between the StorageCraft snapshot device driver and the Acronis device driver which results in a substantial difference in performance when incremental backups are created. StorageCraft's snapshot device driver is far more efficient and fast. This can be easily reproduce by creating a backup job and performing changes to many files after the first full backup and before an incremental backup. In this sense, Acronis is more of a desktop product as it simply consumes too much CPU and I/O bandwidth when taking incrementals which is less desireable on servers.
Scheduled Backups: The schedulers for these three products a
I use SyncBack, free for download at http://www.download.com/SyncBack/3000-2242_4-10548 273.html?tag=lst-0-1/
It works great for me. I've used it for about 4 months, and so far, I haven't had any issues with it. See the website for the full feature list.
zippy
Tape rules the day for cost effectiveness at just about any reasonable scale, and it's a very robust medium for extended shelf life. not a whole lot can go wrong with a tape, really.
Hard drives for off-site storage aren't bad either, but can be costly initially.
mp3s and videos are hard to backup because of the size, but for very important files (i.e. .doc, PDF, Bookmarks, etc.) which are nevertheless faily small, i find the best solution is to have copies on both my Tablet and my desktop, synced via Vice Versa (I tried many programs and this is the only one i found that syncs as soon as changes are deteceted)
Mine stops with a sharing violation when it tries to copy the swapfile.
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Most applications will support burning DVDs compliant with ISO-9660, Joliet, and UDF formats. Some of them can also relax the Joliet restriction you mention. Windows will read the relaxed Joliet discs fine.
Nero can do this, and I suspect Roxio can as well (although I have not used a recent version of Roxio, I rather doubt they'd remove the capability). This is true of the full versions, though I believe it is *not* true of the stripped-down express versions.
I generally use UDF (specifically, UDF 1.02) because you can have true long filenames without breaking standards, and it's supported natively by any operating system aside from Win9x.
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