Cool Backup progs....(ideas)

[John Prophet]

here's what I want.

A backup prog that can do unattended backups to a DVD-RW....first you would do a full backup on a dvd....a full disk image in other words....then you would just put in a blank dvd-r and it would do incremental backups until the dvd-r was full, lol.

And if the comp failed or whatever you would just re-image off of the full backup and then the prog would know how to restore from the 2nd dvd-r. And of course it would keep up with things like you deleting stuff etc.

The main idea being for businesses...trying to make it fool proof, lol.


Are there any progs out there like that?

I ask because I have seen people using backup progs that "backup the whole drive"...but they are not images....so I picture myself there when their hard drive dies trying to figure out exactly what was backed up and how to restore it....with the image you wont have to reinstall the OS etc.


Or is there a prog that does that more or less with an ext hard drive?? I worked on a ladies comp and the way it was setup is that you had to boot with the ext drive off and then turn it on AFTER you were in windows..or it would mess the drive letters up and the system would lock up badly etc.....are all ext hard drives like that?? Or was it just the way someone set it up wrong.

What type of backup progs work with images??

JP

[Peter M]

The functionality you're asking for is covered by classic backup programs that usually work on tape drives.
Now you should ask whether one of those programs supports DVD-RW as backup media.

However, with HDDs being a tad bigger than 5 GBytes nowadays, the backup won't be unattended for long.

I'd rather suggest you go for a low end tape drive (Onstream ADR or ADR2 series, 30, 60 or 120 GBytes) and use the software that comes with them. ADR2 drives ship with software that does disaster recovery (restore entire OS installation from tape).

[nukes]

Windows or *nix?
Most Linux distros ship with tools that would make this a sinch (tar, mkisofs and dvdrecord). However if you want backups like that, a DVD won't get you that far. I would suggest investing in a tape drive, its money well spent (but buy the RETAIL version unless you're absolutley sure that the software you already have will do the trick - I bought an OEM drive and it was just the bare drive, no software or drivers. Windows wouldn't touch it, but it gave me an excuse to move my fileservers to Linux )

[M_Six]

Check out Second Copy 2000. Works like a charm. Will back up files to virtually any media. It's a snap to set up and runs on a schedule.