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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?"
That may be fine for folks like my dad that has a 30gig drive that's 80% empty.
But some folks have 3 terabytes (not porn btw) of HTPC stuff, considering how cheap hard drives are now and there's no good way to back up that much data.. And with hard drives getting cheaper by the day, it seems that the only thing to do is just keep adding more drives. You reach a point of no return where you just have to take the risk of losing your stuff.
I'm looking forward to the 1tb drives that have been promised by years end. Drop 6-8 of those in a vanilla budget box and use it as your backup, power it up only when needed.
I've been using Bacula for a while now. Backing up windows clients, and linux clients. The server side isn't too bad to setup (rpms are available), and configs are standard Linux config style. The nice part, is that it can backup to any media, hard drives, tapes, DVD, CD, etc. There's even a way that it will create bootable CD's that will allow you to become a client, and restore your machine from bare-iron.
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.
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Otherwise, buy a separate HDD and just periodically run a script that recursively copies all files on one drive to the other.
This is exactly how I do backups at work. I have four active file servers and one server with a big damn hard drive on another floor that updates a copy of everything on all the other servers twice a day. I'm using XXCopy, http://www.xxcopy.com/ and it works pretty well - even generates log files similar to BackupExec. Then on the weekends it runs a PowerArchiver script and dumps everything with a modification date less than 7 days old into a zip file and shoots it across the internet to another computer that extracts the zip file onto its own dupe of all the servers, keeping the zip for incremental purposes.
All this for under $100 in software and two 300GB drives each thrown in their ownn old ass desktop. And it's completely automated - no room for human error.
We all have friends (surely?) - we could be doing the same thing across the internet to eachother's houses. Two guys buy big hard drives to be hosted in eachother's desktop (or extra computer) and a script on each computer that dump changed files to a zip and shoots them across the net.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
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.
I have a 2.04TB RAID-5 array (4x750GB drives) attached to a 3ware 9590SE controller. I back this up to a RAID-0 array every so often on my other computer (a bunch of random disks using LVM... I'm not so worried about using raid 0, because it's a backup, and I doubt both boxen will die simultaneously.) I have a crossover cable running between the built-in gigabit ethernet ports on each (Intel Pro/1000), and the backup speed is actually acceptable. (I find that unless you are really willing to lay out for a very good gigabit switch (as opposed to hub), the crossover cable adds a lot for not very much money. I use the second built-in gigabit port on one box, and an add-in 3com card on the other, for normal network activity.)
My backup strategy is basically to NFS mount the other volume and create a giant tar file. Simple, and it works. YMMV
Say it with me now: RAID is not a backup solution.
In my life, I've managed to blow two RAID arrays. The first was in our departmental webserver at work, where a fan ate through a bundle of drive power wires over the weekend, shorting +12 to +5 and really f@#$ing up the entire 9 disk RAID-5 array. Every drive controller board was dead. The better part of that day was when we found the backup group had kept all of our backups on the same DLT tape, because they fit so nicely. Too bad the drive ate the only backup tape when it was put in for restore... Wound up buying an identical drive on eBay, placing it on each disk, and pulling an image. With all that done, I got nine new drives and pushed the images back onto them, and recovered most of it...
The second time was due to a screwy driver upgrade on my desktop machine. Long story short, it mangled large disk transfers. Since I was running software RAID-1 at the time, it mangled both disks in identical ways. I had growing corruption across the array and didn't know it until too late...
That said, I do run RAID-1 at home as a short-term strategy to protect against individual disk failure. That doesn't take the place of my weekly full backup, however. I did cut out the incrementals every night, though. They don't buy me much for my particular style of usage - YMMV.
That's what he gets for giving administrative privileges on his box to someone (his son, in this case) who doesn't need it and thus shouldn't have it.
His son should have had his own restricted account on the box, if even that much (since there was accounting data on the box, I'd argue that nobody else should have had access to that system). Admittedly, once you have local access to the box you can be compromised by someone determined enough, but at least it would take some effort.
Backups are no substitute for proper system administration techniques -- they are a part of them.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
It means it's not a consumer feature on the level of Time Machine.
Vista builds are available for download. You can see how they implemented it yourself.
No, it's easy to use and intuitive because it's a representative interface nobody's ever done before for file backups, especially not Microsoft, who will, as I said, rely on plain calendar and item list controls. Vista's system also does not expose public APIs for application integration the way Time Machine does, letting you recover deleted address book contacts, mail, photos, and more. Vista's only works on the filesystem level.
"Sufferin' succotash."
my i recommed buying a copy of WinRar and telling it to do a store (no compression) and to ignor locked files and put a recovery reocrd and to split the archive to the size of the dvd's and then just burn them your self.. sure it requires you to do stuff but it solves all the problems you stated (WinRar is cheap)
if you want a one stop shop you are going to have to deal with dat,bak, archives that are propritory, and you will end up paying for it too
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