Posted by tim in I hate technology. on July 23, 2006

I decided that I would take today to run a full backup of my 3 hard drives and my 1 network share. I had imagined it to be a simple task, but I was grossly mistaken.

You might ask why I don't just use the Windows backup tool. First off, it's a piece of crap. Second, it's proprietary. Instead, I decided to give "Nero BackItUp" a shot. Well, unfortunately I found that it too is a piece of crap.

The software did what I needed, allowing me to select directories and files to backup, then creating a disk "set" and burning the set to the various DVD/CD-R/RW's I threw at it. A few minutes after the burning process started, it was ready for the next blank disk. Not even a minute after the second disk was inserted, I saw this. I thought maybe it was just an issue with the new DVD-RW's I gave it, so I erased the disks and started over. Again, same thing.

Frustrated, I decided to see what SourceForge had to offer. I searched for backup projects for the Win32 platform and with a keyword search of "DVD". A simple and what would appear to be common task, and there were no projects that matched it. Off to Linux...

I rebooted into Ubuntu "Breezy", and found nothing really that would do what I needed. So I decided to upgrade to "Dapper" via apt-get, hoping that with the new build there might be some new packages. Nope. All that I could find were the usual backup apps, such as AMANDA, which are far from what I would need.

So now, I'm back in Windows, getting ready to start up just plain ol' Nero and burn the files directly. It's going to suck trying to keep the disk sizes <= 4.7GB, but I really have no choice.

Edit: Did I forget to mention that I have approximately 70GB of data to archive?

  • Couldn't you just use another harddrive to have a second copy of all data? It might not be as reliable as optical media, but i've never had trouble with either of my usb harddrives in the 2-3 years i've had them...

  • A) I have no hard drive that big B) I don't trust hard drives C) I have nowhere to plug in such a beast, if I had one.

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