Jordan Vs Romania
Posted on | August 31, 2008 at 6:50 pm | 9 Comments
Movie Review Sunday! I haven’t watched any movies yet this week, so I don’t have one. Maybe there will be a Movie Review Monday tomorrow. So onto another topic.
Pet Peeve of the Day: Why can’t I find a decent PC backup solution?
I’m pretty paranoid about data loss. That’s why I have an external hard drive on my Windows XP Home machine that is used only for backups. Up until now, I’ve been using Genie Soft’s Genie Backup Manager (GBM) Home 7.0 to perform the backups. (Note I have not included a link to the company website, since the last couple of times I went there, my anti-virus program detected a malicious script, so be warned.) I did a full backup once a week, which would take 8 hours or so, and an incremental once a night, that would take like a half hour. I’ve been pretty happy with it, though I’ve never had to actually use its restore capability, thankfully. However since I let Microsoft install XP Service Pack 3 on my PC, the Backup Manager has stopped working. It gets like 31% through the full backup and then it gives an MS Visual C++ runtime error. I tried installing their latest build, and still had the same problem. When I opened up a ticket with the company and sent them a log, they said they couldn’t do anything because they don’t support version 7 anymore. They wanted me to upgrade to version 8 and see if it fixes the problem. They said they’d give me a deal on an upgrade, but I really don’t want to pay for an upgrade at all just because the old version suddenly stopped working. Especially since I’m not even sure the upgrade would fix the problem. At least I could install the trial version and see if it does.
So rather than hassling with that, I decided it was a good time to try trial versions of some other PC backup packages that got good reviews. I’ve been kind of unhappy with GBM – their user interface is pretty weak. And obviously their support leaves something to be desired. I read some reviews and settled on a couple of other packages that looked like they fit my needs: Titan Backup and Backup4all.
I liked everything about Titan Backup and its UI, and it even seemed to do a full backup as fast or faster than GBM. Well, it would if it could actually finish. It got stuck in the post-copy “verifying” stage and went through the destination disk verifying every file once and then verifying every file again. After the second or third cycle of that, I shut it down. Disturbing. Makes me wonder what other problems the software has. But this may be an okay solution if I turn off “verify”.
The UI on Backup4all isn’t as good as Titan’s, but it gets the job done. I don’t like that it won’t do non-compressed backups unless you do them as a “mirror”. So you really can’t do a non-compressed Incremental Backup separate from a Full one (it merges them into one directory structure). Although maybe that would work okay for my needs – I don’t know. But the big problem with it is that it was just taking too damn long, especially on the verify stage. I don’t think a backup program should take 16 hours or whatever to backup and verify ~250 GB. I finally just aborted that one too. And, again, the UI really didn’t do it for me. It’s more difficult to specify included files by type (i.e. all extensions) than it is in Titan, which has preset filters. Also, it doesn’t backup the registry like GBM and Titan. It does have a pretty extensive free plugin system with lots of plugins available for download.
One thing I noticed that kind of disturbed me is that all of these programs come from overseas. Genie Soft is a company in Jordan, and Titan and Backup4all come from Romania. I’d prefer doing business with a European company over a Middle Eastern one (yes I have my prejudices), but aren’t there any good old American software packages for this sort of thing? Don’t talk to me about Norton – I don’t like them. Norton software has a habit of taking over your entire PC and slowing it down.
I’m not really sure what I’m going to do at this point. I’m tempted to just write my own command line script using Xcopy to copy all changed files to the backup drive every night. I’ve already got one that backs up my MP3 files to another drive (I’m very paranoid about losing all that ripping and downloading work). The problem with that is I don’t think it can copy open files, which the backup programs can do using Microsoft’s VSS (Volume Shadow Service). Although I’m not sure it’s really important I backup files in use.
Anyone have any good luck with PC backup programs you’d like to share with me?
Latre.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “i need a name for my supermarket”.
Videogame(s) Played Yesterday: Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin (DS)
Comments
9 Responses to “Jordan Vs Romania”
August 31st, 2008 @ 7:35 pm
Oddly enough, I’ve been struggling with this myself lately, since I realized the backup program I was using (Backup MyPC) is no longer sold (meaning my backups would be useless if for some reason I couldn’t reinstall my copy).
People strongly recommended Karen’s Replicator, which I downloaded only to discover it can’t break a backup onto multiple discs (normally I back up to DVD+RW’s so I can put them in a safe deposit box). You might check into that program before scripting Xcopy.
Then I bought “Acronis True Image 11 Home”, also on recommendations. I figured it would also replace my aging copy of Ghost (which I’m pretty sure isn’t compatible with my current O/S), since it’s both an “image” program and a conventional backup.
It’s not bad as a straight imaging program, assuming you DON’T install it and simply boot directly from the CD. The only problems I ran into were after it writes a DVD it can’t read it (like to verify it) until you reboot (took me a while to figure that out), and that on a computer with two DVD/CD drives it seems to assign drive letters at random each bootup (one reason it took a while). I used it quite a bit while I was rebuilding a computer from scratch for my son, so I could try software and “back it out” if I didn’t like how it was working. Plus now I have an image file of his system I can restore the computer from if (once) he loads it down with malware.
As a conventional backup program, I found it pretty much useless. I’ll skip a detailed discussion, because one of the tests I did was to make a full backup, change a file, then make a differential backup and look to see if the changed file was on the differential backup (it wasn’t). That alone was a major enough problem for me to give up on it.
For now I have an Acronis image of my computer, and plan to make a new image after major changes (i.e., rarely), and I’m going to keep using Backup MyPC for more frequent backups (hope it still works after XP SP3!). I should be able to use Backup MyPC to restore without reinstalling it, since I have the Acronis image. Plus I made a copy of the CD to put in my safe deposit box next time.
August 31st, 2008 @ 10:11 pm
My naive system (please tell me what’s wrong with it): every month, I back up all files (primarily in my renamed “My Documents” folder, renamed because I find Windows’ inane “My” meme infantile – but a few scattered elsewhere). I burn them to a CD-R. I don’t back up anything else, on the logic that if the computer goes boom, I’d have to reinstall all the applications anyway, so I just make sure I have either the disks (if I bought ‘em that way) or whatever file came when I downloaded ‘em that I clicked on to install it in the first place. (Those go on the discs I burn.)
My pet peeve re backups (and I’m not naming names, but they rhyme with “Shrill Baits” and “Shmindows”) is when a certain OS decided that, hey, let’s not have the backup format used by our old OS be openable or compatible with our new OS. That way, people trying to restore data from their old machine to their new one, if they were dumb enough to imagine that a “backup” meant the actual files needn’t be saved in their original form, would find that hey, the only way to get those files back is to find an old, decrepit machine still running the old OS, restore the files onto that machine, and then burn a CD of those files to be transferred to the new machine.
I figured I’d save a few steps by just burning the damned documents, uncompressed, onto a CD.
August 31st, 2008 @ 10:23 pm
Every couple of months I back all the data files to a folder on a portable hard drive. Nothing automated.
About three years ago I had two massive hard drive failures. Since I faithfully back up my Quicken data to CD, I found I really didn’t miss much else.
August 31st, 2008 @ 10:25 pm
I just use MS Backup. It’s free.
September 1st, 2008 @ 12:52 am
I must point out that the question is complicated depending on what you want to protect against:
For instance, if you don’t keep a copy of your backup media offsite, you’re not defending against fire or theft.
If you don’t encrypt your backups, you’re not protecting against a different KIND of theft…
If you just copy/backup your documents, you’ve got a simpler backup solution and you’ve protected irreplaceable stuff, but you’re not protecting the time you spent configuring your system.
Backing up “everything” under Windows takes some care because of how much the OS hides from most applications, so you (usually) end up dependant on a given commercial solution, with the drawbacks outlined in the above blog post… and others.
Same goes for encryption/compression.
I’ll just lightly sidestep how much different (better) the situation is under Linux, and point out one possible solution – use a hack-able NAS box and let it take care of the situation. Most low-end home servers use Linux (anything which hooks up via Ethernet rather than USB has to have a computer inside anyway), and I’ve yet to run into one which doesn’t have a forum/blog devoted to what all cool stuff you can do once you gain commandline access.
I don’t get a kickback or anything, but my little DLink DNS-323 is a solid, inexpensive little server which has “unofficial” (but tacitly allowed – does not affect the warranty) backdoors to let you onto the command line to install almost anything you like. One popular application – really just a couple of scripts – creates a backup very much like Apple’s “Time Machine” and I myself have added some tweaks that lets it slurp files off my Ubuntu system and my wife’s Mac automatically, silently and – most important to me – without using any proprietary stuff. In fact, it doesn’t do anything I couldn’t recreate from memory given access to a free Linux bootable CD. But I can also restore my system to a blank HD, lock stock and barrel.
YMMV for Windows, but it may be worth a look if you don’t mind tinkering. These low-end NAS boxes are proliferating, with some as low as $120 bare (no drives) and they can act as a quiet, low-power computer for other things like background BitTorrent downloads, iTunes/media servers and etc too.
September 1st, 2008 @ 4:11 pm
Thank you all for your informative comments. Looks like I’m going to have to do some more research. I especially need to decide what it is I really want to do.
InfK, your solution looks way too complicated. Half the time, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I’m not much of a tinkerer these days. I want plug and play.
September 1st, 2008 @ 4:58 pm
Plug and play, you can have. But whether or not the company who gives it to you will be around next year, no amount of money will settle. So it’s like I said – not a black-and-white issue, it depends on which particular itch you want to scratch. For me, I wanted automated, thorough, and NOT proprietary, and I had fun learning how to get there. (also I made some mistakes along the way that were anything but fun)
September 1st, 2008 @ 11:06 pm
Bill the Galactic Hero,
I just use MS Backup. It’s free.
I tried using the backup that comes with XP, but couldn’t figure it out in the time I was willing to spend trying. I was attempting to back up to a set of DVD+RW’s, and it wanted me to use some weird Removable Storage Service. I tried to figure out the Removable Storage thing, but Help just kept sending me in circles of meaningless gibberish.
September 7th, 2008 @ 4:14 pm
Phil spake:
“I tried using the backup that comes with XP, but couldn’t figure it out in the time I was willing to spend trying. I was attempting to back up to a set of DVD+RW’s, and it wanted me to use some weird Removable Storage Service. I tried to figure out the Removable Storage thing, but Help just kept sending me in circles of meaningless gibberish.”
Fortunately, all I’m ever doing is backing up all the documents from the one hard drive in the PC to an external USB hard drive. For that task it seems pretty straight forward to me. Perhaps because I’ve been using MS Backup for years, as I’m too cheap to buy anything else, I’ve grown accustomed to its interface.
It’s scary how little I do know about backup options, given the fact I spent eight years designing tape drives! The trouble is from my point of view tape drives are just amusing device s for transferring a mylar strip back and forth between two spools. The fact that they can also store data is incidental