I just backed-up the files in My Documents and it came out at 4,855 MB. The CD I have is only a 700MB CD. So I thought I would zip the back-up files and burn them onto the CD. Well I zipped them and that file is still over 4,000 MB’s? What gives?
Any Ideas? Should I go buy a larger CD?
That’s like wondering why your entire bedroom suite won’t fit in your hatchback, even though you took apart the dresser and squeezed your pillows in a bag.
A CD is only going to hold ~700MB max by design; there is no “larger CD”.
What would work is a DVD. A regular single-layer will hold 4.7G, which won’t quite fit your original files, but would fit the compressed one. (Though I’d just delete some files and back up again to make it fit; more convenient). Of course, you would need a DVD burner in that case, which by the sounds of things you probably don’t have. Some backup software will split backup files based on various media sizes; check to see if you can generate a bunch of 640M files, which you could burn to a series of standard CDs.
Come to think of it, most zipping programs will do that as well. So there’s a few options for you.
There are no larger CD’s: 700 MB is the standard size. Unless you consider a DVD to be a “larger CD”; DVD’s can hold about 4700 MB. But you’d need to hacve a DVD burner to save your data to a DVD.
Your other options, course, are to save your data to several different CD’s, or to buy some sort of external storage device.
Zipping makes a significant difference only on files that are compressable, like text files. Things like mp3’s and jpg’s are already compressed, in a sense, so you can’t compress them further without losing information/resolution.
You need an external hard drive the same size or larger than your computer’s hard drive.
how about copying it all to a simpledisk-on-key?
How does one get 4 GB of data onto a 32 MB Flash drive?
oops …I guess I picked the wrong linky link…But at least it has a pic of a disk-on-key. I’m remember when a whole GB was hard to find…now I’m just waiting for a 20 gig version.
You could always use 2,778 floppy disks.
If you have a fast internet connection and a gmail account you could use GMail Drive - Wikipedia
Dunno if a new gmail account would have enough space. They seem to give you bonuses the longer you use it. I’m currently using about 49 megs of my 6 gigabytes.
Alternately you could copy your files to another computer over a network http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=87c0a6db-aef8-4bef-925e-7ac9be791028&displaylang=en
If you don’t have a DVD burner but just a cd burner you could use winrar WinRAR archiver, a powerful tool to process RAR and ZIP files and make a spanned archive. Then your 4 gig compressed file would be broken into smaller chunks which would fit on cds. To extract you’d just copy the chunks back to your hard drive.
If you can burn dvds that would be a better option as it’d all fit on dvd.
The best option would be copying it to another hard drive, removing the hard drive from the computer, making a dvd, and putting a copy on gmail drive. Then you’re covered no matter how the shit hits the fan.
Oh wow a GMail drive. That’s cool. I’m off to look into that. Thank you.
Damn you Dudley I was just about to go to Wal-Mart to grab 2000 floppies. :mad:
How about storing them using free online storage sites? You can use a couple different ones in case one of the sites ever go down.
http://www.esnips.com/
http://www.xdrive.com/
You can even hack an extra gmail account and Use Gmail as an Online Storage Vault.
I was also going to suggest GMail Drive, but on preview I see The Tao’s Revenge beat me to it.
The current record for a Flash drive is 64 GB, with a retail price of $5,000.
Kinda pricey for most folks, unless you are selling to the DoD to go with those toilet seats or hammers.
Another option is MozyHome. It’s an online backup service that combines a software client (that can automatically back up your files) and online storage. Up to two gigabytes of storage is free, while you can buy unlimited online backup for five bucks a month (this is for home use only; commercial use is more money).
Or what I used to do when I backed up stuff to CDs was to maintain several separate folders, each containing no more than about 650MB.
It appears GMail has blocked GMail Drive. I installed the gmail drive, and then restarted. The I tried to move the folder to the gmail drive [which I saw under My Computer] and my machine crashed.
I could have installed it wrong, but I think I followed the steps carefully. I’ll look into online storage…
so far there have been 3 post recommending online backup sites. I disagree.
Am I the only one who thinks it is a bad idea to deposit your precious data in the hands of total strangers? You lose all control over your property. You don’t even know what country their computers are located in,and you don’t have any practical recourse if they just close down the site on day and go home. If their stock value drops, or somebody buys them out (think Chcago Reader vs Creative Loafing),–what happens to all your data?
That’s a legitimate concern. But you do need to get your backups off-site. It may be enough to leave them in your office desk or your bank safe deposit vault. You need to do regular backups, move them offsite and test them regularly to make sure the backups are valid.
As I said, an external hard drive may be the best overall option. Combined with decent backup software and Bob’s your uncle.
Most archive/compression programs have an option to split the archive into chunks, so one can make CD (or DVD) sized chunks.
WinRAR even has pre-set chunk options at CD and DVD and other media sizes.
Two external hard drives might be better. You could do daily incremental backups and then a weekly full backup to one attached to your computer, and then one day each week swap it with the one stored offsite.
Just think of the trouble I saved you. You’d have gone to Wal-Mart, bought your 200 ten-packs of floppy disks, got home and started your backups – only to have your backup program sometime Thursday tell you that it needs backup disk #2001 to continue because you miscalculated. It’s enough to make a normal man bawl like a mentally-unbalanced onion peeler. 