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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.
"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.
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.
excuse me, but a copy IS a backup.. and a direct copy of a hard disk to another disk is both a copy AND a backup.
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.
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
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
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.