Back-up my Computer.....wah?

Factual Questions
1

OK, so I don’t back-up my computer…I should, but frankly I have no idea how. I can assemble it, do quite a bit of coding and developing on it, but I don’t have a goddamn clue about OSes and backups. So I come to you for help.

A pair of questions:

  1. How do you back-up your machine?

  2. How should the average user (me) not running databases, just your basic Windows system backup their stuff?

I read alot of references to hard drive images, backing-up to tape (not gonna happen for me), and so on. Are there multiple ways one can do this? Does it take a third party software to do it right? I have 2 hard drives, do I need to back up to CD-RW? What Windows utilities are built in for this kind of stuff. How is backing up your OS different from backing up your data. A few of my software programs do their own backups (ie. MS Money), do I need to do these as well? Anyone care to give a brief crash course for me, so that in the event of my computer turning against me, I can save all my porn…and work/finance stuff :).
I just don’t get it.

2

My philosophy is that I backup anything that I would be upset if I lost it. I don’t back up any of my applications, the OS, or anything that I can recover fairly easily in case of a disaster. Basically, I just backup what I’ve created myself, along with e-mail from others.

It’s a pain to restore the OS and re-load all the applications, but it should be a rare event, so the time you save in backing up by not including those makes it worth it. It also helps that if your backup strategy is easy, you’ll do it more often.

It’s also true that you might not even want to restore the applications and OS. There’s something to be said for starting with a clean install and not carrying forward all the old junk that accumulated and might have been causing the failure.

I use a zip file for my backups. I have a text file that lists all the directories on my disk that I want backed up, I create the zip file, and copy it to a CD-R. I use Winzip’s command-line zip program to create it.

3

You really should have a zip drive or a cd-rw if you’re serious about it. Regular disks are wimpy and don’t fit very much at all.

Basically, it’s true, you save what would give you a headache or even an inventive expletive if you woke up tomorrow and found it gone. If you’re at college you can put a lot of stuff on your network drive, but it’s safer to put it on disks. Windows is fine because you have the CD (I hope). Appz you can either re-download or you have the CDs, unless you’re one of those people who gives away your program CDs after you install… in which case you’re screwed. But a good idea is to go through every once in a while and save your important things… I’m in school so I save all my reports and papers to disk…

Just a warning… when I was a senior in high school applying to college my computer crashed two days before I had to send everything in… and then last year right before all my final papers were due… thank god for backups… so these things can happen at the worst possible times!!

4

Well, the things I want to save are fairly high volume. I have a shitload of MP3s, videos, and digital pictures on my home machine. I don’t know if there’s any good way back these things up. I’ve invested alot of time and bandwidth to building my MP3 library, so I’d hate to lose that to a HD failure, but I don’t know how realistsic it is to back these up to disc.

The only thing I really would need to backup is my outlook.pst, I’d like to hang onto my bookmarks, and all the config files for my various apps (FTP client, SSH client, etc.).

Is there a decent way to schedule a back-up of a given set of files to CD-RW. Perhaps something in the windows scheduler that prompts me to copy certain files weekly, ideally something that I could click “backup” and it would copy a set of predetermined files…you know, so I don;t have to browse and copy all these files one at a time.

Is there any good way to backup MP3s and video without just installing two large HDs and copying everything to both? Zipping tese types of things isn’t real beneficial.

5

You can divide backups into to groups: full and incremental. Full backups record everything. Incremental backups record everything with the archive bit set, which is set when a file is opened or changed. This applies to Win32, but I believe there are similar features on Unix and Mac. The point of running incrementals is that you can make small daily backups of everything that’s changed without wasting space copying things that haven’t changed. If you ever lose anything, you get the most recent full backup and then step forward through the incrementals replacing anything that was changed between the last full and the last incremental.

On my system, I have my drives partitions so I have the OS on one, other apps on another, “data” on a third (which includes easily replaceable stuff like downloaded documentation, sample code, etc.) and projects on a fourth. That means everything I’m working on is isolated on one drive. I don’t bother to back up OS, apps, or data. You could do the same thing on one partition by just selecting to backup only certain directories.

I run incremental backups on the projects drive every night so that every file I worked on during the day is copied over to a spare disk on the file server (just another box, not my workstation in case the workstation drive fails). Every day’s backup is recorded in a subdirectory named with the date. When I have about 600Mb of incrementals, I burn them to CD and delete.

Every so often, particularly when I’ll be out of the office and need files remotely, I burn selected projects folders to CD so I get a full backup of those jobs.

As far as apps, I wrote my own little utility to scan a selected drive for files with the archive bit set and copy them to a target drive, reproducing the file structure. I did it myself because I wasn’t happy with the commercial versions that came with my old tape drive, but there are plenty of commercial and shareware apps available to do the same thing. You should check out Tucows.com for a selection.

I use writable CDs because they’re cheap, fast, and portable. DVD and tape hold a lot more, but you can’t carry them around and drop them in any machine you find.

My system may seem convoluted, but it’s really pretty simple once it’s routine. In my experience, every user has to have a catastrophic loss once before they take backups seriously. If they ever go through it twice, I have no pity.

6

micco, I like your strategy, although its probably a hell of alot more complex than what I need. I’m still a bit lost on how you actually implement these things though.

Assume I don’t have a network, I have two HDs (one 13 GB, one 30 GB), and a CD-RW. I really should make daily backups of my .pst file, and my My Documents folder. I’d like to back up my media collection say, monthly.

What do I use to do the full and incremental backups? How often do you do a full backup, and therefore how many incremental ones do you archive?

How much space do I really need to handle all this on one system, how can I store this stuff offline if I’m dealing with 15BG+ of stuff? I don’t really think a tape drive is practical for me.

7

I also have a bunch of MP3s, and I just burn them to a CD based by date. For example, say you accumulate 650-700MB (depending on disc capacity) of MP3s. Copy them to a CD-R and mark the date. Then, depending on how often you download MP3s, check to see when you have another batch ready to backup. Get all files after the date of your last backup.

I also use the same approach as CurtC. I don’t bother backing up the OS or apps that I can reload. I will make a one-time backup of programs that I’ve downloaded, like Winamp, in case, for some reason, they aren’t available anymore.

8

As cheap as large hard drives are now buy one and use Norton ghost to make a full backup of your system. You can make an exact duplicate of your boot drive in about 5 minutes depending on the speed of your machine

9

You could just back up one drive to the other assuming they are separate physical drives and not just partitions on the same device. This isn’t ideal since there are plenty of failures that might take out the entire system (virus attacks, etc.) but it’s better than having everything on one drive.

For daily backups, a backup utility would make it really easy to do either incrementals or full backups of selected files. On most backup apps, you can pick specific files to backup and then save that as a profile that can be re-run easily. You could do that to copy mail and documents to the second drive easily. You can get shareware utilities to do this, or you could just copy the files in the file system. Tucows.com is a collection of freeware and shareware, and you should be able to find a lot of backup apps there. You also might search CNet. Both sites offer reviews and quality ratings so you’re not just blindly choosing among the options.

For your media collection, I’d start by making a full backup and then keeping track of new files so you don’t end up backing up the whole thing repeatedly. One thing I’ve done for MP3s (ripped from my own CDs only for playback on my own machine) is divide them into 600Mb subdirectories and burn them to CD in those groups. New CDs get ripped and put in a new directory until there are 600Mb, and then I burn that and start a new directory. This way, I only end up burning each file once.

For full backups, I just use the software that came with my CD burner to select the project directories, sometimes spanning more than one CD. In your case, you could make a “full backup” of your important files just by copying them from one drive to the other. The only disadvantage to this system is that copying the files or burning them in place does not reset the archive bit, so any changed files that get burned in my full backups also get included in the next incremental. If I used backup software for the full backup, it would reset the archive bit.

I do incrementals daily and full backups every couple of weeks. When to do the full backup is a matter of choice, and the main issue is that if you ever lose something and have to restore it, it’s easier to start with a two-week-old full backup and step through fourteen incrementals rather than a year-old backup and hundreds of incrementals.

In my case, I burn them to CD, so I have all my old incrementals and fulls. In your case, if you’re just copying from one machine to the other, you could keep a full backup in one directory and incrementals in another, and every time you replaced the full, you could delete all the incrementals you saved since the previous full (assuming you never want to roll back to previous versions of projects).

10

micco wrote:

I don’t think you needed to write your own utility. The XCOPY command built-in to Win32 does exactly that if you use the /m switch.

BTW, I use incremental ZIP files, where I only archive stuff with the archive attribute set (clearing the bit after zipping). WZZIP’s “-i” switch zips only files with the archive bit set. The old PKZIP had this option, but it didn’t support long files names, and the newer PKZIP250 doesn’t have that switch in the free version.

11

How I SHOULD back up my computer:

Retrospect and a new crate of Zip cartridges every Friday.
How I actually DO back up my computer:

(1)

A disk image of the OS (System Folder) is kept on a physically different hard drive, complete with Control Panels, Extensions, & Preferences.

(2)

The various applications generally fall into one of three categories:

• older than last summer when I upgraded the hard drive. In which case it is on one of the backup CDs I burned in the process of moving everything to the new hard drive.

• commercial s/w purchased & shipped or bought over-the-counter. In which case I have the installation CD.

• downloaded. In which case I save a copy of the installer or the program itself (depending on how it is distributed) on the same physically different hard drive that contains the OS backup

(3)

My actual WORK–things I myself have created, projects etc-- is copied from the Projects partition of my hard drive to the appropriate backup folder with the aid of the File Synchronization Control Panel, if I saved it to my own hard drive. If it is work-related (I use a laptop so it’s the same computer for work and for play), I have most likely saved it to the company’s server, and they have their own nightly backup routine.

(4)

The main hard drive is partitioned into many separate partitions, most of which are bootable and several of which contain their own copies of Disk First Aid, TechTool Pro, Norton Utilities, and Disk Warrior. The physically separate hard drive, also bootable, has its own copy as well. Finally, I have a “TECH DISK” bootable CD. For most purposes, booting from a different partition and doing some light repair on the main partition fixes whatever needs fixing.

12

You might be surprised how much of Win32 I’ve rewritten…

I mentioned Tucows, but didn’t provide a link. Here’s the page that has their list of backup software:
http://www.tucows.com/system/backup95.html

13

Used to be that DOS came with BACKUP and RESTORE commands. Dunno if they still exist on regular windows, but NT comes with NT Backup.

If you’re looking for the easiest way to back up, go buy a tape drive. They almost always come with some sort of backup software, and you can get 'em for a couple hundred bucks. They’re easy to use, and will do the whole full or incremental backup thing. Just set it up to run once a week in the middle of the night, remember to put a tape in, and you’ll be fine.

You could probably buy something to use your CD RW as well, but a CD is limited as to how much it can store, and trust me, you’re not going to do backups on a weekly basis if you have to sit and feed CD’s into a drive. Nobody is that organized.

14

Get another HD & a Raid card. Youll have a perfect backup of your HD anytime.
Thing is there is not much say about archival backup, this is where you might like to keep important pictures & docs for way into the future, in that case, zips & cd’s are quite right for this & another HD wouldn’t do this for ya as you’d be writing over your data each time.

So, you like get a cd writer & store your important docs & photos, etc, on cds, which can be easily cataloged & stored for 100 years.

A Raid or just another HD is great just for full system backups.

15

Many great suggestions. One additional thing to add… make two sets backups and store one of the sets somewhere far away… at a friend’s or a parent’s house, or at work. Having your data fully backed up won’t do you any good if your house burns down and your backups are sitting in a stack next to your PC. This is another argument against making a RAID configuration your sole method of backing up.

handy, CDRs may or may not last 100 years… I have many properly stored CDRs that went bad in under a year. Make sure you buy high-quality CDRs like kodak or mitsui gold, and test them once in a while to make sure they still work.

Tape drives are good for backing up huge amounts of data and great for incremental backups, but they have downsides… you have to use special software to gain access to your backups, and random access to your backups is slow. And for the truly paranoid, tape backups aren’t safe against EMPs; CDRs are :slight_smile:

I like backing up to CDR vs. tape because I get fast, random access to my backups if I have a catastrophe. Any computer can read a data CD formatted with CDFS right off the bat. If your house burns down and you need to continue working on a different computer, CDRs get you back up and running quicker.

Also, tape drives have the same problem as RAID does in the fire/theft scenario… before you can use your backups, you have to buy a new tape drive and load the backup software. If you have CDR backups, you can just pop them in any old CD drive on any old computer.

I beg to differ! I am that organized.

Oh yeah… if the stuff you’re backing up is at all private or sensitive, encrypt it before you back it up. Over time you end up with a ton of backups, and they can get lost. You don’t need copies of your credit report selling for five cents at Goodwill.

I use PGP freeware’s self-decrypting archive utility to do this. That way I don’t need any extra software to decrypt my backups… just double-click on the encrypted archive and enter my passphrase.

Whole books have been written about how to backup data and to organize your data to facilitate backups. It’s worth spending some time now to formulate a strategy. It will save you a lot of time and grief in the long run… sooner or later you will have a catastrophe which will destroy all your data.

-fh, who routinely heard grown men break down in tears after telling them what “your hard drive crashed” meant

16

There’ve been a lot of good suggestions so far but I want to add my own 2 cents.

Any backup solution should prepare you for the eventual day when your disk drive goes “Gaaack!” and refuses to surrender up its contents. I’ve been through this and it’s a terrible feeling. Putting backups on a different partition is only a stopgap solution.

Hands down the best backup solution is tape. Yes it has the downsides of requiring special hardware and software (Windows 9x has a built-in backup program that’ll work with most tape drives). On the upside however, they’re moderately fast and can hold oodles of data. it’s extremely easy to do a full or incremental backup of the system and data – push in a tape, start the program, and go to bed. It also allows you to store the tape in a safe place away from the machine.

CDs are okay if you have a fast drive (I don’t) and don’t want to back up a lot of data. A full data backup on my machine would take about 20 CDs so that’s out for me. If your important data will fit on a few CDs, that’s might be acceptable but you still have to face the CD lifetime factor. Unlike stamped CDs, a burned CD won’t last (almost) forever.

My own solution was to buy an extra hard drive and install it in a removable tray. When I want to do a backup, I retrieve the tray/drive out of it’s hiding place, slide it into the machine and use Windows Backup to create archive copies of important data on that drive. Backup done, I pull it out and stow it away again. This solution is very fast and works well but it has some limitations that make it less than perfect for an inexperienced user.

17

Large hard drives are cheaper than new fast cdrw drives. I bought an extra hard drive that I do full image backup to and then remove it from the computer for storage. Little important updates, I burn to an cdrw drive more often. Images are always encrypted when I save them.

18

“Tape drives are good for backing up huge amounts of data”

Yeah, but consider if they you are going to be able to use them in the future. What computer in the future is going to come with a compatible Tape drive? I got some Tapes that use a old drive that no one sells anymore.

I like cd’s I think that most computers in the future are going to be able to use them.

dvds would, of course, be awesome.

19

The best backup solution is one that you find yourself actually willing to use. Great backup procecures and equipment don’t do you any good if you find yourself doing your backups only on rare occasions because you hate dealing with it.

Take any of the suggestions you see in this thread and implement it. Or come up with your own.

But don’t do nothing.

20

Can a CDs contents be verified simply with Scandisk, or do you actually have to open the files to make sure they’re readable?

…
"Men have become the tools of their tools. " – Henry David Thoreau