Easy backup solution?

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emp

emp

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Jun 29, 2006
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With yet another HDD crapping out on me, I need another solution for my backup needs.

Wants:

- WinXP based
- Chronological backups
- Possibility to backup on HD, CD and via FTP
- Possibility to define various backup paths for different folders
- Free if possible

Anyone?

::emp::
 


Backup & Recovery - SonicWALL, Inc.

This is probably more than you need, but it is off the chain for anyone that can afford it. I use it for the company I work for, we have one box (4440) in our main office, and then I put another box (3440) in a branch office a few states over. All of our users (including vpn users around the world) My Documents, Desktop, and bookmarks/settings are continually backed up to the box at corporate which instantly replicates to the branch box. It also does backups of all of our SQL db's every 15 minutes and backs up all of our exchange and active directory data. I had a payroll database get corrupted last month, and before, we would have had to get the tape backup from Iron Mountain, restore a Full backup from sunday, then incrementals from monday and tuesday. Then the payroll department would have had to enter in all the data again for the day. Instead, I chose a point about 5 minutes before it got corrupted, 3-4 clicks later, everything restored and no one lost data. Also, you specify the folders you want to backup, and you can set it to ignore certain file types, ie; we ignore our employees .mp3 files. The compression ratio is sick, and the encryption is very nice. Worth taking a look at the small box probably.
 
This is a pc based solution..but, I know a few people that are dumb as shit when it comes to computers and they have no problems with carbonite.com and their service. $49 a year. I contacted them and asked if they had a size limit and they said no. May be worth a try.
 
Take the old computer out of the corner/basement/closet, dust it off, slap some HDs in it (hard drives are so damn cheap these days). Get some auto backup software, or just drag and drop your work folder at the end of each week.

Or raid...
 
Ben you are a fucking genius...

now...

The auto backup software was exactly what I was asking for.

Nice try, tho.

::emp::
 
If you wanted something portable and weren't interested in setting up something custom this is another option...

Newegg.com - Seagate FreeAgent Desktop ST302504FDA1E1-RK 250GB 7200 RPM USB 2.0 External Hard Drive - Retail

I suggest creating an image of your base machine as well. This way when you want a fresh install it will take you 20 minutes to get your system running again instead of an entire day to reinstall all of your programs. What I do is install a fresh copy of my OS along with installing all my base programs, firewalls, etc. Then create an "image" of my machine with this...

Newegg.com - Acronis True Image Home V11 - Retail

It is pretty easy to use as well.
 
I am verrrrry interested in this too (you'll see why soon).

I basically want a complete system to backup all my websites, databases, etc... to both another server and to my local external harddrive. Questions include:

  • What software to run on the HD?
  • Setup via server with Cronjobs/FTP? How is this done?
  • Obviously, transferring EVERYTHING each night would be a huge amount of data... is there software that will check to see if a file has "changed" or if there are "new" files and only write those to a new "nightly" archive? And don't say "yeah... Mac Time Machine".
Backing up my laptop would be helpful too... but I'm guessing I just need some simple software for that. Let's hear it...
 
Stuff like that is called an "incremental" backup.

Still looking.

::emp::
 
fresh install of Windows XP, install VMWare (or Virtual PC) on the machine, and back up the virtual machine image files every so often. Something happens, your whole machine is still there, short the data from the last backup.

Run this on a desktop with fast drives and a couple gigs of memory and you won't even notice the difference (unless you play games, the stay in the host machine).

I worked for a company doing software dev, and this is how the servers & workstations were set up. Nice and easy to do.
 
emp: I'm in the same situation. On all of my dedicated linux boxes I have a rock-solid rsync script that does both incremental backups and rotation for daily backups. i basically have three cronjob scripts: daily (which rotates on a rolling 7-day cycle, only incremental), monthly (which rotates on a 12-month cycle, full backups), and year-end full backups. However, on my WinXP workstation, I have no solution, but I need something with similar functionality.

I've decided to use the built-in Windows Backup utility combined with custom batch files. I think you can accomplish what you want (custom backup dirs for different folders, ftp, etc) with very simple batch scripts. The only issue I have yet to resolve is how it will rotate the logs, otherwise I'll need to manually prune the old backups, and I don't want to do that. I think ideally everyone wants the backup process to be completely automated and behind the scenes.
 
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