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

DAR = Disk ARchive

[DrJimbo]

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.

Re:What about RAID?

[QuasiEvil]

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.

Re:OS X 10.5: Time Machine

[Overly Critical Guy]

And that makes it what, nonexistant? It is there. The reality distortion field isn't that strong, is it?

It means it's not a consumer feature on the level of Time Machine.

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?

Vista builds are available for download. You can see how they implemented it yourself.

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!)".

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.