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?"
Easy solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe not the most elegant solution, but it work's - until you run out of dvd's
Re:no offense (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You aren't looking for backups (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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),
Re:Backups don't need to be tricky these days (Score:3, Insightful)
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:OS X 10.5: Time Machine (Score:3, Insightful)
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, and it will be able to do more than they've said so far.
Re:You aren't looking for backups (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why not tape with Windows Backup? (Score:2, Insightful)
Cause tape doesn't work, simple as that. It's a crappy, slow and expensive medium. Why anyone at all, home users or enterprises still use it is beyond me.
The recent slashdot article about Capricorn selling you a 120TB rack of spinning disks with aggregate throughput of 40Gbps for $200K should put the final nail in tapes coffin.
Let's say you buy 2 for redundancy, show me a tape backup system that runs at 80Gbps and stores 240TB using only 2 racks worth of space and zero human physical intervention.
-B
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?
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.
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.
Re:Why not tape with Windows Backup? (Score:1, Insightful)
Because hard drive cost per gigabyte now either matches are is close enough to tape that there is no need to put up with:
a) slow access and write times to tape
b) higher media failure rates of tape,
c) cost of tape drive maintenance (cleaning tapes, etc)
and, most importantly:
c) much higher failure rates of tape drives.
I used to have a number of DDS4 tape changers, as well as XLT, 8mm, etc. What do I have my company using now? 160 GB IDE drives in cheap removable sleds.
Couple of Ideas (Score:2, Insightful)
I have used this at customer's sites with a two dive rotation and it has worked very well. I had one customer that somehow managed to wipe their server (still not sure how, but it was 2003 SBS) and had them from dead in the water to fully up and running in 45 minutes. Tape would have taken me a minimum of three hours never mind DVD. It also is quick to backup. Most tape drives take 3 hours to backup an average small server and I can get an external drive backup in 10-30 minutes.
I have used the one touches and tapes. Tapes are slow and I have had major reliability problems and cost per MB seems high. A new (not questionable from ebay) AIT 72GB setup cost one of my customers over a grand (SCSI controller, cables, drive and tapes) versus 100 to 150 per drive for externals. The one touch worked well for a couple of my customers, but I'm not a really good advocate of the Dantz software. Its clunky from the server version I've tried, its confusing versus ntbackup which asks "backup or restore". Easy to figure out as that.
xcopy is good too, but if there is an issue, not too many users these day are familiar with DOS and know how to maintain it versus determine what the issue is.
my 3.14195 cents worth.
Re:Backups don't need to be tricky these days (Score:3, Insightful)
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 dumped to, then swap it with the second drive and bring the first home with me. If the computer and on-site external HD get ruined or stolen, I am out a single days worth of data, but that's it. I keep a HD with OpenBSD installed and Samba configured, so my disaster recover plan is to throw that HD in (pretty much) any old machine, restore from the external hard drive, and drink a beer or three.
Re:Backup to DVD? That is SO 2003! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Backups don't need to be tricky these days (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why not tape with Windows Backup? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 robbed?
From an enterprise perspective, this is where a multi-solution approach works best. You want disk images or the equivalent in separate online storage for hardware failures, offline media stored offsite for serious disasters (or spend a LOT of money for mirrored online storage in diverse locations with a buttload of bandwidth to cover replication), and online or nearline file backups for when the CEO deletes all his mail.
For home use? I don't really know what's practical. Something that easily provides solutions for all three scenarios and can be easily set up, maintained, followed religiously, and restored by John Q Public is the utopian ideal, but I don't know of any solution that truly meets that need yet. Maybe Time Machine will but the jury is out until it actually ships.
Online backups have a lot of potential for true Disaster Recovery, but the consumer-level options I've seen so far either don't offer enough disk space for broad system backups, or they're just too much money/month to pay for enough storage.
Re:typical... (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 on the manufacturing quality (whether the edges and data side are sealed), heat, humidity and exposure to ultraviolet light.
That said, any home-use backup probably isn't going to need a long shelf life, so really it comes down to convenience; in this regard hard drives win again.
But ultimately, I'd be very wary of technical advice given by someone yet to master the use of the "shift" key.
Re:make one (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm truly astonished how many people have taken the question "how do I back up 30G onto a few DVDs" to mean anything from "what fool would back up 10 etabytes onto DVDs" to "tell me why RAID is not a backup solution" to "please recommend some random piece of Linux/Mac software, or a Linux script" to "do you know what the price of tape-drives is on Ebay".
Chrissake people, answer the F question! I think the only good answer I've seen in the first page of comments is a suggestion to try Nero's backup tool, which, OMG!!! can actually backup 30G onto a few DVDs. Quick Googling suggests the following too Backup-Platinum [backup-platinum.com], though I think the OP also specified a preference for free software (possible even Free) -- so can anyone else help?
Remember: simple, WinXP, 30G, DVD, preferably free. Repeat with me now: Simple, ...
Re:simple backups with rar (Score:3, Insightful)
Carbon Copy Cloner (Score:3, Insightful)
Highly recommended.
(I am not affliliated with CCC, just a happy user)
I'm sorry (Score:2, Insightful)
Everyone is so damn helpful to your problem, except for the fact that every nerd will want to give you advice for MacOS, Linux, RAID configurations, backup computers with cron-scripts, and every other thing you didn't ask about. Never mind the fact that you don't own the equipment and software they namedrop, and that what you ask should be really easy to do somehow. It's still lame old Windows with just a DVD-writer, that's not hightech enough and so it's not a valid question on Slashdot.
At least make the posters here happy now that they can drop what awesome hardware they own and what much cooler OS'es they run than you and the average computer using sucker out there (which includes me.)
Re:Backups don't need to be tricky these days (Score:3, Insightful)
Timeshifting vs. librarying vs. the USSC (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me that librarying could be easily interpreted as just time-shifting of an arbitrary duration, as long as the works are not further copied. On the other hand, in the ruling, there is a mention of 'time shifting' being the recording of a program at one time, and then watching it a single time later on. Almost as if the playback was a destructive process, and consumed the recording while doing it. However, this is obviously not the case, and any time-shifting technology inherently gives you the ability to watch a recorded program more than once, which really blows away the single-playback test for time shifting.
What's really interesting is that if you read the footnotes in the opinion, there is a sentence which reads: "To the extent that this practice involves librarying, it is addressed in section V. C., infra." (footnote 39) But -- and this is the best part -- there is no section V.C. in the ruling. Section IV has subsections A through B, but no C. Section V doesn't have any subsections at all. It's as if they wrote a section of the opinion to cover home librarying, but then removed it at the last minute, without even updating the footnotes.
This leaves it in a grey area, and to the best of my knowledge there's never been a straightforward test of whether or not librarying for personal use only (without copying or sharing) is infringement. As the Sony case doesn't specify a length of time that a recording can be shifted, I think it could be argued that it's allowed (provided you can pass the other Fair Use tests). Of course, all this is becoming less and less relevant with the DMCA and DRM; there is no Fair Use exemption to the DMCA (although there is one for "interoperability"), so in today's climate, the Sony case wouldn't have even happened -- thus it's hard to extend the ruling too far into the present and future.
At any rate, given the current murkiness of copyright and Fair Use law, I think an unshared archive of legally recorded OTA programs is probably the least of anyone's potential worries at this point. If that's the only thing you have on your computer or your house that might possibly be in violation, you lead either a very virtuous or very boring life.
If you want to read a rather lengthy discussion of the issue, wherein some fairly well-educated (and some not so much) slug it out, it's been beaten to a bloody pulp and then some over at AVS Forums: http://archive.avsforum.com/avs-vb/history/topic/
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, erase everything on it from another machine, put it back in and rebuild the array).
I found out the hard way that it's quite easy to end up with a bunch of cross-linked files if you botch a rebuild. At that point, you're basically hosed. My ASUS mobo has built-in nVidia RAID-5, and after my first rebuild about 60% of the original files were just missing. Running chkdisk on it restored the files, but about 50% of the restored files (so 30% of all the original files) were corrupted with bad clusters.
Also, a 1TB RAID-5 will show marked performance degredation if it's used heavily & not defragged regularly. A defrag operation can take 24 hours plus to complete on a terabyte filesystem if not run nightly.
I see Maxtor offers some pretty good sized drives for the OneTouch backup system; you can currently do a 500Gb setup @ less than $0.55/Gb, which ain't half bad. For content other than large media files, rotating a couple separate external devices like this would make for a pretty effective and secure backup strategy. If the data is sensitive, just TrueCrypt ( http://www.truecrypt.org/ [truecrypt.org] ) the drives first thing.