Backups and strategy

[igalan]

Recently one of our members had serious faliure in the main drive, loosing many valuable files (hopefully he could recover most of them ). This kind of things can happen to anyone, anytime. So I think it's a good idea if we can share some ideas and experiences with backups .


Hardware:
-I have a DVD+-RW with InCD installed (so I can format a CD-RW or DVD+-RW and use it like any other removable drive). You can use any CD-R/RW (except very old burners, most support packet writting), or any removable drive.

Software:
I have tried a few programs, but now I use
PolderBackup. With this program you can define several backup sets and some options for each backup. Each set consist on a selection of folders, files/wildcards and exceptions (the last one is important for me). The back up is done on a folder of your choice (in my case on a folder on a CD-RW) and it's done compressing each file to zip (so you can easily restore single files).

There is also MOB (My Own Backup), but I can't find a link. It's also a very good program, but does not support wildcard exclusions.

-What do I back up:
I have a backup set for my documents that consists on:
"...\My documents\*.*" except "*.mpg *.wmv *.avi *.asf *.jpg *.tif" (my documents except video files and pictures -I back up them separately)
"...\Program data\Identities\*.*" (email)
"...\Program data\Address book\*.*" (address book)
"...\Program data\Opera\Opera7\opera6.adr" (bookmarks of Opera)
"...\Favorites\*.*" (Internet Explorer bookmarks)
"c:\Program files\P2P\eMule\config\*.*" (eMule settings and stats)
"c:\Program files\Trillian\Users\*.*" (Trillian settings and logs)

Backing up the whole "c:\Documents and settings" is overkill, because you don't want to back up things like Internet Explorer Cache, and many other files that Windows XP installs by default.

I have another backup set for the pictures (on a separate CD-RW and without zip compression).

-When to back up:
I have two CD-RW for back ups. At least once a week I do a backup on one CD-RW (incremental back up), and next week I use the other CD-RW. Since I do incremental back ups, it's very fast.

-Full backups:
With my DVD burner came Veritas Simple Backup. This program is really good, with it you can do a full backup on DVD or CD (or any combinations, since a full backup will probably need a few DVD/CD). It can even create a set of disks for emergency crash recovery. The problem is that to back up 35 GB you need 8 expensive DVD+RW disks (or a lot of CD-RW). So I don't do full back ups... You can also do selective back ups, so sometimes I do a back up of the whole C:\documents and settings" on DVD+RW.

[rastagard]

Great post, igalan!


I back up my entire C: drive using Norton Ghost and an extra HDD.This has saved my bacon on more than one occasion.


In addition I make frequent backups of My Documents, which for me will fit comfortably on a single DVD-RW. Anything I "save" goes into "My Documents". I also copy my bookmarks, and other key items into this folder and I save a copy of my "Documents and Settings" folder into this as well. (this folder contains most every custom setting for your programs. ) This is on a seperate partition and I occasionally Ghost this in its entirety onto another HDD as well.


To parphrase a well known saying, There are only three things you need to do with your computer to avoid disaster, Back-up, Back-up and Back-up!

[RipperRoo]

Originally posted by rastagard

To parphrase a well known saying, There are only three things you need to do with your computer to avoid disaster, Back-up, Back-up and Back-up!

too right, the three backups system is known in the trade as son, father, grandfarther.
the first backup you make is called the son, the next time you backup the son becomes the father, and the new one is the son, the third backup the father become the grandfather, the son the father and again, the new backup is called the son. at this point the grandfather is usualy shipped off site to permanant storage, so if anything happened to the data center the backups came from, the data isnt lost to the company.

very good post igalan, stuff everyone should know

[lordpake]

Good post, thanx! Always room for improvement at this end of the web...