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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.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- 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.
"I am trying to do a simple backup on my home XP system/s"
Patient to Doctor: It hurts every time I do this."
Doctor to Patient: Stop doing that.
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.
No offense, but... if you have no intention of providing an answer to the OP why are you wasting his time?
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...
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.
-- Anais Nin
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.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
WinRAR is far from free, you'd do better to recommend 7-zip. However, if you read the original post, your recommendation is far from suitable. The poster wants to be able to select a bunch of files, turn a knob, flip a switch, burn a bunch of DVDs consecutively, and have all his files on them uncompressed. At best, wasting 30GB of hard disk space to create split archives for the purpose of easy burning to DVD can be considered a dirty hack at best, it would take too long, and would leave the files compressed, which the OP didn't want either. Bonus to you for also throwing in a proprietary data wrapper (RAR), you insensitive clod!
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings