Using DVDRW for Daily Backup?

dalk

Hi all,

Was asked the cheapest way to implement a daily backup for a small business. I know some of the smaller shareware backup progs (and even Nero) support backup to CD/DVD so I suggested that.

Anybody any experience using DVD for backups? Good/Useless/Unreliable? Should I really be pushing them to invest in proper backup equipment (ie tape)?

dalk

zuma

Veritas backup and tape is the most common way....the tape could be substituted with an external portable Hard drive.

DVD is just too failure prone for backups Im afraid!

jimmycrackcorm

Iomega Rev drive is much better than tapes these days.

Capt'n Midnight

what OS ?
if using 2000/Xp/2003 you can use Ntbackup to dump everything to single file. There is even an option for ASR but it requires a second HDD in the system as it nukes the original partitions.

The single file could then be burnt on to DVD. If their data set goes over 4.7GB game over as it gets messy.

Veritas like most commercial backup packages uses any excuse not to run. And unless you buy the optional add on for open files will give scary backup failed error messages when it is should say "one file was locked open by an app so I skipped it"

Just make it quite clear that a cheapo backup is not as reliable as a proper one - set the expectataion day one, Tape is evil and a real pain, but has a proven track record, just don't expect to restore data from a 5 year old tape because the drives and software will have changed. ( apart from SCSI only servers, laptops and some new SATA only systems - a 15 year old IDE drive if it hasen't given up the ghost will work in almost any PC )

astec123

Use Sync back a free application and a portable hard drive. Or if you can streach to it on your internet connection use the web to load the files to a remote server or even your home system.

There are many companies offering cheap remote drive space and if your a very small company you could always use something like gmail drive if your talking about only a few dozen text files but even then thats not the best option unless we are talking 2 or 3 staff members.

Board@Work

make sure they take their backups off site incase of fire, theft or flood.. It happened to a friend of mines business when it was robbed. lost all his equipment and external hdds and tapes.. 4 years of invoices, customer contacts the whole lot gone. it very nearly ruined him.

He now uses protego online backup. Not the cheapest but when its your livelyhood and that of your employees don't be cheap for cheaps sake.. too much at stake

Mutant_Fruit

If its just a few files (less than 4gb) then use DVD-RW, but only if its not going to be stored for long. If its a rolling backup (i.e. you only keep the last 7 days of material) then use 14 DVD-RWs and take a double backup everyday. And stop using the dvd's every 6months and replace em (just in case they get corrupted).

If ever one disc gives a read error, replace the lot. Of course, it all depends on how mission critical the files are.

DemonOfTheFall

You could write a batch script to dump the contents of your hard drive into multiple 4.5 gig RAR or ZIP files then burn them to a DVD for you.

Shouldn't be very hard at all, all you need is a commandline archiver, a commandline burner and incredibly basic batch file knowledge

dalk

Hi,

Thanks for the replies everyone...

Confimed my own hunch as to using DVD as a backup media... ie usable but not the best.

Its back to that business and asking them how much their data is worth to them...

Capt'n Midnight

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

You could write a batch script to dump the contents of your hard drive into multiple 4.5 gig RAR or ZIP files then burn them to a DVD for you.

Shouldn't be very hard at all, all you need is a commandline archiver, a commandline burner and incredibly basic batch file knowledge

If Windows then Use Ntbackup as schedules and does beckground copy in most cases. If NT then Ntbackup only works to tape (in exactly the same way that NtBackup in later versions makes tape backup extremely difficult to automate)

also for windows users www.7zip.org command line util is yer only man for compression size.

For *NIX backup of every sector on the system to removable media (external USB 250GB HDD) is a one liner.

Khannie

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

also for windows users www.7zip.org command line util is yer only man for compression size.

Seconded....I love 7zip. though it is processor intensive (though you can of course trade speed for compression and probably still come out better than other archivers).

dalk

Hi,

Crap... The Box is running NT4... Didnt know that that version will only dump to tape. Can just use something else. Actually i might give Cobian Backup a whirl, see if its good (freeware).

Was going to use NTBackup to hardisk folder. Then rar. Then burn. All in a scheduled batch like Demon suggested...

Thanks for the heads up regarding 7zip... looks good.

Thanks for the info guys

Capt'n Midnight

If any of the workstations are 2000/Xp you can use NTbackup on them to extract most of the files - Won't backup any system files in use , you could probably also use ghost to take a snapshot of the system drive that would fit on a CD, that is if all apps have been installed on the data drive.