It's 2006 and Backups For Home User Still Tricky? 715
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 don't need to be tricky these days (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Backups don't need to be tricky these days (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Do you use iSCSI on Gb Ethernet, or external point-to-point SAS for something like that?
Does the box need high IO through put as well?
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Re:Backups don't need to be tricky these days (Score:4, Interesting)
My backup strategy is basically to NFS mount the other volume and create a giant tar file. Simple, and it works. YMMV
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Sure, the chances of both machines failing on their own at the same time is probably kind of slim.
But what about external factors? Say, power surges, lightning, floods, fires? That is why backups kept on removable media, stored off-site, are needed.
Yeah, tape drives and tapes are both expensive and too small; I have switched to two external HDs. I leave one plugged in overnight: it gets dumpe
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Wow, where can I get a gigabit *hub*??
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RAID0 vs bunch of drives (Score:3, Informative)
RAID0 is striping. So every other chunk of your data is on each disk - so every file is on every disk. So you are essentially guaranteed that any time 1 disk goes bad your entire array is useless - COMPLETELY useless. Lose 1/4 of the drives, lose 100% of the data.
Unless you have an extreme need for contiguous, single file read/write speed, RAID0 is a poor choice. (For many asychronous reads a bunch of drives with your data randomly split between them is mu
Re:Backups don't need to be tricky these days (Score:4, Insightful)
This situation does not represent the average home user. For the average home user, the parent's solution is more than enough.
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Timeshifting vs. librarying vs. the USSC (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Backups don't need to be tricky these days (Score:5, Insightful)
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),
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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 (sinc
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RAID1, with multiple mirror drives which are switched out in order to take the backup off site, would work just fine, and is preferable in many ways; particularly because the 'copy' is done continuously, so taking a backup is as simple as 'failing' one of the drives in the RAID1, and replacing it. The regeneration of t
Re: RAID-5 (Score:3, Insightful)
I would highly recommend that anyone thinking of implementing one for the first time first read up on the hardware and drivers they intend to use. Next, after purchase & initial install, they should tranfer a bunch of test files & practice a rebuild by simulating a drive going bad (take 1 drive out, era
Re:Backups don't need to be tricky these days (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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It's the way of the future
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Robocopy (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Backups don't need to be tricky these days (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Backups don't need to be tricky these days (Score:5, Informative)
I saw someone had 160gb drives on sale for $29, no rebate.
Big drives are getting extremely cheap and I'm digging it..
Re:Backups don't need to be tricky these days (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Carbon Copy Cloner (Score:3, Insightful)
Highly recommended.
(I am not affliliated with CCC, just a happy user)
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I also rsync my data once a week to an off-site server, just to be safe and to provide an extra layer of recovery if I don't realise within a day that I've lost something important and it is gone from my local backup too.
I'
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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.
So what 'proprietary data wrapper' are you talking about now?
Re:Backups don't need to be tricky these days (Score:4, Interesting)
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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A daily backup job could be set up with at as such:
at 01:00
Re:Backups don't need to be tricky these days (Score:5, Informative)
I would not recommend the article writers idea of using a series of DVDs, since it is more time consuming, requires manual changing of DVDs, and the DVDs have a far shorter shelf life than hard drives. Hard drives are pretty cheap these days and it will quickly become cheaper than buying loads of DVD-Rs anyway.
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Where did this myth that CD-R's and DVD (+/-)R's have a short shelf life come from? I can assert that it IS a myth, since I have a stack of about 30 CD-R's that I burned in 1999 that are still perfectly readable. Since then I've been burning about 100 CDs a year and last fall I backed up the whole collection onto hard drives. Every single one was readable.
Are you people storing your discs in sandpaper-envelopes or using them as frisb
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As do I, and I just completed a backup review for a major retail chain. We buy external USB drives by the hundreds to handle the backup of our store back office servers, although we tend to use Seagate and LaCie rather than Maxtor. We use hardware RAID 5 in the servers for hardware fault tolerance, and the externals for archival and/or software fault tolerance. One thing we ran across with the Seagate drives that forced us to switch was the fact that our b
You aren't looking for backups (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:You aren't looking for backups (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You aren't looking for backups (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Whats wrong with wanting a backup solution that is transparent and actually works? In case of emergency I really don't want to be stuck with a bunch of proprietary archive files or compressed files that only make a bad situation worse (bit flip in a normal file is easy to recover, in compressed file not so much). Of course there is a need for a little bit of metadata
In a way you've answered the OP question... (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
Re:You aren't looking for backups (Score:4, Interesting)
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/ [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.
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Backup to DVD? That is SO 2003! (Score:5, Informative)
"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).
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Re:Backup to DVD? That is SO 2003! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course its about restoring. And he's going to be able to have his system up and running a lot quicker after a hard drive failure by just restoring a linux-made image of his partition to another drive (copied either while running a bootable linux live cd or from a copy of linux on the backup hard drive) than by trying to restore using Windows - he needs a running copy, which his replacement drive lacks, so he'll end up having to install Windows over again.
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In this case, the "normal PC users' minds" are the ones who are correct and all of the "me too" posters who are offering HD solutions are wrong.
I have to say I'm really disappointed with the Slashdot hive mind's response to this question because I'm with the submitter on this. I want to be able to
Linux home network backup. (Bacula) (Score:5, Informative)
I use it and it's prevented some real heartaches caused by deleted/corrupt files.
.Mac Backup (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Other benefit of Backup - files stored plain (Score:3, Informative)
I'm surprised there are not more solutions that provide this very simply ability that really is a lifesafer when you just want to recover a little data.
Easy solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe not the most elegant solution, but it work's - until you run out of dvd's
mp3s (Score:2)
Otherwise, as another poster has suggested.. you could get a real OS. (or install cygwin
XP (Score:4, Funny)
Patient to Doctor: It hurts every time I do this."
Doctor to Patient: Stop doing that.
OS X 10.5: Time Machine (Score:5, Informative)
not for Windows, but arguably (will soon be) the greatest step forward for "home user" backups.
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But as you said, it'll be great for average home users. Someone needing a more robust backup strategy would still have to look elsewhere. But who knows... Perhaps Apple hasn't yet fully disclosed all of Time Machine's capabilities,
Re:OS X 10.5: Time Machine (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:OS X 10.5: Time Machine (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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"average"? (Score:2)
Well, your first misstep there is assuming that your experience is indicative of the average home user. I can tell you that your average home user doesn't really have more than 4.7 gigs of critical data that they would be interested in backing up.
(The ones that do, just back up the less important stuff to an external drive. At leastr that's usually what I recommend)
Depends on the OS (Score:5, Informative)
Problem solved.
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A USB or firewire hard disk is a better solution (Score:2)
For my Windows XP laptop, I actually use Ghost. If I need to, I can boot off the Ghost CD and restore my laptop from the last recovery point which is automatically done every morning to a USB 80gig hard disk. That 80gig disk is actually the old hard drive from the laptop. I'd replaced it with a 7200rpm drive to improve speed a bit and got an external
Pick any two (Score:2)
You aren't going to get all three in one package. Nope, no way.
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Nope. No way.
DAR = Disk ARchive (Score:5, Interesting)
It's command line based and you will need to read the documentation before using it, but it does what you want.
Why not tape with Windows Backup? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Then again... (Score:2)
Take my advice on this -- NEVER format an external drive as "dynamic". ALWAYS make it "basic"
Re:Why not tape with Windows Backup? (Score:5, Insightful)
"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."
DDS-4, SCSI, Sun external DDS-4.... a large percentage of home users are still trying to get CD/DVD burning down without problems, and your suggestion is an entirely new tech that they need to buy used and will have even less support for?
Did you notice big disk drives are cheap? (Score:3, Informative)
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But people need to think about what they are doing backups for. Are they doing backups for Disaster Recovery? Or for Mistake Recovery?
Mistake Recovery is straightforward. "Oops, I just deleted my MP3 folder!"
For Disaster Recovery, which kind of Disaster are you preparing for? Are you trying to protect yourself from your hard drive failing? Or are you trying to protect yourself from your house burning down or being r
DVD Writer... (Score:3, Informative)
WindowsXP pre-dates DVD Writing as the norm of the time (2001), so it doesn't inherently support it (which draws out the OSX and Linux crowds of telling you to get a real OS and then they list 20 command line tools that are fairly cumbersome.)
Since it appears you are using Windows, when you can, move to Vista, Backups are easy, able to use DVDs, and can do full system bit by bit as well as file/folder backups, all with a couple of clicks.
Automate with free software (Score:2)
Buy a 320gig HD (about $120cdn), pop it into an external enclosure (or not), and use something like: SyncExp (http://syncexp.com/). Pick your host and mirror drives, run it as often as you want manually or setup some automated crons. And yes, it's for windows.
Otherwise go nuts and setup a slave linux box with a redundant RAID5 array and setup cron jobs there to backup all your critical data ev
Since you'll likely refuse to give up windows.. (Score:2, Informative)
DVDs? why not use Floppies? (Score:2)
uh
21,240 Floppy Disks
either way you try it once and then ....Never Again!
you are using the wrong media for your "EZ BACKUP"
as others have pointed out, use an External HD with something like Retrospect installed.
Push a Button, you're done.
Abakt (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.xs4all.nl/~edienske/abakt/ [xs4all.nl]
Support both 'traditional' (compress/split) type backups and a file copy method (good for a USB hard drive, for less savvy users who want to be able to just plug the thing in and retrieve the file they just borked).
Open source. Feel the love.
Not the easiest thing to setup, so I set it up for them, save the profile, and tell them how to do a backup (plug in
Seems like an obvious answer to me... (Score:2)
Bring it to your buddie's house, no proprietary crap to deal with
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RSync and Robocopy with External USB Drive (Score:2)
Easy to get working, and the software is free (as in beer).
If you're really looking for data protection, RAID the external drives...
Backing-up to CD/DVD is too slow and time consuming for any system with appreciable amounts of data...
Ever tried SizeMe? (Score:4, Informative)
A few suggestions... (Score:3, Interesting)
The number 1 mistake people make when doing backups: They write far, far too much data to their tapes. If I had a nickle for every time I saw a user backing up their swap partition and wondering why they where running out of tapes... well, it'd maybe get me a free meal a month. At a fast food joint. From the dollar menu. I digress. Make sure all of that 30Gb is stuff you genuinely can't get anywhere else. Oh, and RAR works great with all those important documents.
Seriously, though. Why not use a tape drive? DDS tape drives sell for next to nothing on Ebay (my DDS-3 6 tape autochanger was less than $20). NTBackup is free and spans quite nicely. DDS4 tapes hold 20-30Gb of data and cost about the same as a high quality audio tape. Incidentally, Microsoft: Please modify NT backup to work with CD/DVD-RWs (or even DVD-RAMs). I wait for the feature with every new version of windows, it sounds like such a simple idea to me but they've never done it.
Small business:
Nero bundle a fairly decent backup product with their Burning ROM software. It's very reasonably priced. It comes free with many burners.
Backup Exec isn't much more expensive and works VERY well. Tapes only, though.
You're really, really cheap? Buy another hard drive and mirror your primary. 30Gb drives costs next to nothing.
Hard? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
rsync (Score:5, Informative)
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'.
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rsync is nice - I use it all the time - but it's painfully slow and stupid when it comes to dealing with moved or renamed files and directories. Try renaming a 650MB iso, and then watch rsync blindly recopy the file across the network even though it already exists at both ends.
Unison borrows from the rsync algorithms, but is much more intelligent, can be run GUI or console, and is cross-platform. I highly recommend it.
use synctoy for windows xp (Score:5, Informative)
On Win32? XCOPY (Score:5, Informative)
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.
... Or maybe XXCOPY (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Acronis TrueImage (Score:3, Informative)
make one (Score:5, Informative)
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
Nero does exactly what you described (Score:3, Interesting)
Why are backups so tricky? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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RAID is really mostly about availablity, not backup. And, I'd say recommending RAID as a replacement for backups is selling a false sense of security.
Re:What about RAID? (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hard drives are designed to run for tens if not hundreds of thousands of hours before failure; the probability that one will spontaneously fail after a few hours use and months of storage is extremely small. Optical media, however, start decaying from the instant they're burned; how long it takes depends o
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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