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?"

Comments

Backups don't need to be tricky these days

[vwpau227]

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.

Re:Backups don't need to be tricky these days

[pair-a-noyd]

outpost.com has 300gb seagates (pata) for $79 flat, no rebates and free shipping. That's insanely cheap.
I saw someone had 160gb drives on sale for $29, no rebate.
Big drives are getting extremely cheap and I'm digging it..

Re:Backups don't need to be tricky these days

[PalmerEldritch42]

Since he said he is using Windows XP, I would just recommend using the free MS PowerToy called SyncToy. It can do incremental or complete backups, with quite a few very easy to use options, to a local hard drive or a network drive, and can be scheduled to work automatically using the built into Windows Task Scheduler. It is all free (with the exception of a possible hard drive to store the backup data).

I would not recommend the article writers idea of using a series of DVDs, since it is more time consuming, requires manual changing of DVDs, and the DVDs have a far shorter shelf life than hard drives. Hard drives are pretty cheap these days and it will quickly become cheaper than buying loads of DVD-Rs anyway.

Backup to DVD? That is SO 2003!

[tomhudson]

"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).

Linux home network backup. (Bacula)

[AltGrendel]

If you're running a home network with a mix of Windows workstations and Linux servers, I'd recommend bacula. It can be tricky to setup, but it will backup to DVD, tape, hard disks, etc..

I use it and it's prevented some real heartaches caused by deleted/corrupt files.

.Mac Backup

[Queer Boy]

That's what I use, but increasingly if you want an easy and elegant solution to any computer problem you have to be using Mac OS to get it. Of course, it's $100 a year for .Mac but you get multi Mac syncing, an email address, a website blah blah.

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.

OS X 10.5: Time Machine

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

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.

Depends on the OS

[maztuhblastah]

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.

Why not tape with Windows Backup?

[WidescreenFreak]

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.

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 ... whoops), I use a six-month rotation.

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.

rsync

[TheGratefulNet]

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'.

use synctoy for windows xp

[porsche922]

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

On Win32? XCOPY

[MP3Chuck]

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:

xcopy C:\ D:\ /d /e /h /o

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.

make one

[philipgar]

first, create softlinks of all the files and put them into a directory called backup or something.

then, just use a simple script, something like

mkdir /tmp/somerandomdir
cd /tmp/somerandomdir
tar -c /backup > files.tar
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

... Or maybe XXCOPY

[vtcodger]

XCOPY32 had no small number of bugs, and I'm not sure that they ever got fixed. The bottom line was that using it was a crap shoot. It might do what you told it to do in the switches, or it might do something else entirely. And using the same switches in the same order on a different disk sometimes produced different results. e.g the same switch settings that copied files from one hard drive, might set up an empty directory tree when run against a different drive.

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.

Re:You aren't looking for backups

[Xenna]

A 1 on 1 diskcopy is a backup in the simplest sense thinkable.
Backups should protect you against more than just disk failure.

Let's list a few scenarios in order from more likely to less likely:

1. User error (this may be personal but I've lost more data to inadvertent deletes than to any other events)
2. Software error (corrupted files)
3. Hardware breakdown (disk failure)
4. Total catastrophy (like your house burning down)

The exact disk copy protects you from scenario 3 and scenario 1 & 2 provided you find out about your problem before another copy was made which is by no means guaranteed.

I would at very minimum advise to use a snapshot type of system (google for rsnapshots). On a relatively static dataset snapshots don't take huge amounts of space, but they protect you fully against scenarios 1, 2 & 3.

Use rsnapshot on an off site (colo?) box to protect you fully from all four scenarios. There are even commercial parties that offer online backup capacity.

These days where we store most of our memories (Digital photos and movies) on digital media I consider a solution like this to be almost a necessity. The chances of your house burning down may be slim but they're big enough to take measures.

If you're more disciplined than me you may get by with regular DVD backups but I know myself, if I don't automate things it's a disaster waiting to happen...

X.

PS: I don't backup any HTPC files, I'm prepared to lose those.