The Best Backup System?

[Dr. Jones And The Addiction]

I have always been a pretty casual computer user and have never bothered to backup anything on my HD. Now that I have spent so much time downloading Mods and installing them for CMBO and CMBB, I don't want something to happen that would cause me to do it all again. Especially since all the Mods in the CM database don't seem to be CMMOS compatibale. What is the best way to backup everyting in CMBB and CMBO? One of the backup programs you can buy, or a Zip Drive, or is there a better way than either of those?

[easytarget]

do you have a cd-rw?

if not, hard drives are cheap, at least they are where i live - seems like every week fry's is running a deal on them with coupons and rebates that makes them so cheap that in my opinion at least a 2nd hard drive is the best soln

i have one drive that has the o/s and pretty much nothing else on it - if it crashes, i just put in another one and load up the o/s again

and i have one hard drive that has nothing but installed games and software and my data files (digital pix, word docs, excel files, mpgs and

mp3's)

i use partition magic to make a partition on the primary drive where the o/s lives that contains nothing but a back up of the data files on the second drive (that way i've got two copies of everything that's irreplaceable

if either drive fails, no biggie, either i have a back up of the data on the other drive and/or i've got the o/s on CD for reinstalling

net result, everything is backed up

while this is a somewhat manual process, it works - period

not something i can safely say about most back up solns i've tried in the past

the other soln would be two drives set up in raid 1, but honestly, i don't want to hassle with setting up raid - so i've basically created a manual version - addmittedly only for the data files

in the past i've used norton ghost, it makes an image of the drive and while it works, i hated the fact that it required a boot disk and ran from dos - but it definitely works as well

[tar]

What operating system? I could suggest some programs to look at for Mac OS.

[brooktrout]

Zip disks are ok for small sets of backup data and you can find the drives cheap right now but the media is still expensive per megabyte. As someone suggested a CDRW drive would probably be the cheapest solution for archiving. However you would need to manually span the data across the 650-700 MB discs or buy a utility to do just that.

The other solution is to buy an external harddrive or buy the external case and put an older HD in it. USB 2.0 or firewire would be best but you can use it on a USB 1.1 connection (just very slow). This way you could start or schedule a nightly or weekend backup during the evening. If your OS is a version of NT (NT 4.0, 2000 or XP) then you can use a Microsoft utility called Robocopy (robust file copy utility). You can download the util here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en

Just install the resource kit and you will find robocopy.exe and robocopy.doc in the tools folder. This util has over 40 different switches to customize your backups but you could just use something similar to the following:

robocopy "D:\CMBO" "U:\CMBO" /MIR

This switch will Mirror the directory tree D:\CMBO and its contents to another drive and folder - U:\CMBO. The first time you run it it will make a duplicate of the source folder onto the destination folder. From then on when you run this same command it will only copy files that are newer making backups very fast. The mirror switch will also remove destination files and folders that have been deleted in the source. You can then put your batch command into the NT scheduler and have it run every weekend night unattended.

You can even use this util to backup across any networked pc's if you have them. Something similar would work for that:

net use u: \\anothercomputer\d

robocopy "D:\backup" "u:\backup" /MIR /R:10 /W:5 /NP /LOG:ROBOJOB.TXT

robocopy "D:\updates" "u:\updates" /MIR /R:10 /W:5 /NP /LOG+:ROBOJOB.TXT

net use u: /DELETE

The above would map the U: drive to \\anothercomputer\d and start the mirror switch with 10 retries waiting 5 seconds between retries, turn off copy progress output and log the results to the text file. The log+ would append results to the text file. Put these commands in a .bat file and place it in your scheduler for nightly backup.

Edited to add:

From robocopy's documentation:

Note As Robocopy uses the CopyFileEx() Win32 API, it can not run on Windows NT 3.1, Windows NT 3.5x, nor Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows ME.

Since the above util only works on flavors of NT, if you have Win9x or ME then you can use a similar freeware utility xxcopy:

http://www.xxcopy.com/index.html#pagetop

[ November 04, 2003, 10:01 PM: Message edited by: brooktrout ]

[Dr. Jones And The Addiction]

Thanks for all of your responses. I am running Win98 and I think I am going to try Brooktrouts suggestion and download Robocopy.

[Dr. Jones And The Addiction]

I should say....the Win98 equivalent of Robocopy.