Re: OT: Backup software (and scheme, easily verifiable) for MS-Windows

On Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:59:28 +0100, Jonathan Campbell wrote:

Wanted: suggestion of backup software (and hardware?) and an easily
verifiable scheme for naive Windows users.

Questions:
- What do you mean by 'verifiable'?
- How much data does he need to back up?

The obvious approach is to buy 2 or 3 USB drives, each big enough to take
a complete backup, and run a daily backup cycle. Many come with decent
Windows one-touch backup software. Keep them offline when not actually
being used and store at least one, preferably the most recent, in a fire
safe or outside the building.

Be wary of any scheme that writes a single archive file to a VFAT backup
drive because all VFAT filing systems have a hard limit of 4GB on file
size.

When you consider media, IMO USB drives are the way to go because:

- Flash memory is more expensive than disk for a given capacity
(£123 for a 64GB USB stick vs £57 for a WD Passport 320GB hard disk).

- Both CDs and DVDs have capacity limitations (650MB for CD, 5GB or
so for DVD) though the drives are dirt cheap. However, you still
need to buy disks from time to time.

- Tape also has capacity limitations and is the most expensive option
(200-400 GB off a £700+ drive plus media). That is 5 times the price
of USB disks: compare one tape drive plus a box of tapes with the
cost of a cycle of 2-3 USB disks.

Rolling you own:
================
If the data he needs to back up is guaranteed to remain under 4GB or can
be easily partitioned to stay under this limit, you may be able to set up
something similar to my Linux backup system, which:

- makes a scheduled compressed backup overnight to a permanently online
USB drive thats unmounted when not being written to. This is managed
by a script that first deletes the oldest backup, so the disk fills up
and then becomes self-managing. I use gzipped tar for this, but zip
would be fine for Windows. Its not safe against mains spikes or fire,
but should survive almost anything else. Run time is about an hour.

- every week I use rsync to duplicate the file system to a different USB
disk, which is offline and in a fire safe when not being written to.
This takes typically 10-15 minutes. Rsync is available for Windows.

But note that I do whole filing system backups and have reformatted my
USB drives to ext3 to avoid the stupid VFAT file size limit. All the USB
drives I've seen come pre-formatted as a single VFAT partition.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |
.

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