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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?"
On the Mac side, the same hardware with a program called "SuperDuper" is even better. It'll create an exact -- BOOTABLE -- image of your hard drive. So, if it all goes to shit on the main drive, you can hold down the option key at boot time and choose to boot off your backup. Then, simply "re-backup" the backup onto the "main" drive, and you've restored your data.
I've already used it a couple times when I was testing out Leopard. Same disclaimers as you: don't work for any of the companies involved, just a really big fan of a customer.
RAID-5 works but it only solves part of the problem, namely the failure of a single hard drive. However, what happens if the data on the drive gets wiped out by a virus or a malicious user? The RAID array will not solve this problem. Or if you have multiple hard drive failures. The RAID array will not protect against that either.
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. 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. The RAID array did nothing to save the data that was deleted from his system. 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),
These are the good old days you'll be telling your children about. Make them worthwhile.
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 know RAID seems to be the in thing because of the functionality built in to SATA controllers but RAID is NOT a backup solution by any means. It is for speed, availability, and hard drive redundancy. Depending on the mode your choose, typically not all three at the same time.
I guess you could play with words and suggest that redundancy means backup but slipping with the mouse and deleting the directory "d:\my important stuff" in that RAID setup makes those similar words suddenly mean two completely different things. A live and normally accessed file system is not a good choice for a backup by any means. I used a bad mouse click for an example but I'm sure you can think of many more hazards.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
It's all about restoring. There is no point in backing something up if you can't restore it.