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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?"
And that makes it what, nonexistant? It is there. The reality distortion field isn't that strong, is it?
And this is based on what, an objective and in depth review of Time Machine and Vista? Or the carefully scripted and brief presentation in Jobs' keynote? Or just rabid Apple fanboyism?
Because though no-one had/has done it yet, you've still leapt on the opportunity to refer to them as rabid fanboys, completely ignoring your rabid Apple fanboyism. I love it "easy to use and intuitive (because I saw Steve do it on stage via a Quicktime video and it looked simple!)".
Assuming that the poster has win-blows, just use winRAR.
.bak file, then rar that
You can set it to write the files into 1/2 dvd chunks, and copy most of the disk.
If you have lots of nested folders longer than 100 char (total path length)
just use windows backup feature to write one huge
into 1/2 sized dvd chunks.
you can also have some nifty error correction and if you scrag
an entire DVD, no worries. Use the "recovery volume" option.
winrar logs can be verbose if you wish.
Free tools are out there, eaven for windows.
First off, you'd bitch if you were shot with a silver bullet. Haven't you heard that the perfect is the enemy of the good? You seem to think that a good, but partial, solution is useless unless it's a complete solution -- yawn -- your call.
Second, the previous poster was not talking about the source system -- he was talking about a multi-drive system used _only_ for backups. Turned off otherwise.
We had a customer who decided that RAID was the way to go to protect his data and that he did not need another backup device, or regular backups at all.
Dumb shit.
He was quite upset when his son deleted his entire windows user profile and all the files associated with it -- including his accounting data and documents folders for his home based business-- when he needed more space to store music and picture files on his system.
Dumber shit. Anyone who keeps critical information on a system and lets a kid play on it is looking for trouble. He may as well have turned off all his AV and firewalling, then put it on a high-speed line to the internet for a couple of weeks.
The RAID array did nothing to save the data that was deleted from his system.
Duhhh. Someone ought to firewall this guy's system using an axe on his power cord.
Since then he has been very happy with the Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive we sold him to back up his data (and the shiny new notebook computer for his small business, so that his son could have his old desktop all to himself and stay out of his system),