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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 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.
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- 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.
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.
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...
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.
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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.
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."
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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