Creating Back-Up Sets

[Tezz54]

Living with an NT workstation, I have been relying on Network back-ups to protect my data. Now I'm travelling with a laptop, constant replication of local and network data is proving quite onerous and, I feel, risky.

I'd like to establish a local routine that daily backs-up all my important documents to a network drive and also gives me the ancestral relationship that will allow me to restore any file from any day over say the previous month.

In another life I had a collection of back-up sets that gave me a Son, Father, Grandfather family tree of incremental back-ups. But that was some time ago, and I have forgotten how I did it. Any advice please.

Thank you

Tezz

[ixl]

Hi Tezz,
I understand what you mean in general terms, but am not sure what exactly you are trying to do here... of course you can define backup sets in any convenient fashion. It depends on how much data you have to back up and how long it takes, really.
Are you able to do backups from the notebook without using the network? How much data are you moving and how often do you feel comfortable backing up?

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Charles M. Kozierok
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[Tezz54]

Hello IXL,

Thank you for your interest. If you have time to review this and advise I will be very grateful. Apologies for the length, if you get bored, I will understand.

I have three areas of my hard disk data that I want to Backup.

Some application data > 150mb
My Documents > 100Mb
Winnt/Profiles > 50Mb

My first full back up of this data took around 30 minutes using an evaluation copy of Avantrix Back-up Plus V6.0

The back-up facilities supplied by my office and WINNT only allow back-up to tape, but I am not given any access to tape drives. I do have a Dell 120mb Superdisk floppy drive, but this takes over an hour to zip up My Docs alone, and after 3 refreshes, the zip file decided to go bad.

As far as I can recall, the set-up I used to have looked something like this:

Week 1, Monday, Full backup
Tues>Fri, Incremental Back-up
Week 2, Monday, Back-up week 1 archive, then restart with full back-up
Week 3/4, Monday, Back-up week 2/3 archives , then restart weekly cycle
Week 5, Monday, Back-up weeks, 1>4, archives then restart whole cycle

This relies on being able to create discrete incremental back-ups. Avantrix BUP+6, does not appear to reset the archive bit when backing up, so I have to backup to an existing archive if I want incremental back-ups. This would mean I would lose Monday's backed-up file on Wednesday if the source file changes on Tuesday.

I have suffered two Hard Drive crashes on this machine in 3 months. The second was less painful, as I did have a network copy, but that is really hard to keep up without some sort of automatic schedule. If you can recommend any alternative products that do what I want, I'd be a very happy man.

Cheers

Tezz

[ixl]

Tezz,
Not entirely sure. I think it depends on your hardware mostly. For my money, I would stick to network backup. It's fast, and relatively easy to do.
Does your laptop have 100 Mbit ethernet? I back up my main files using a copy of Seagate backup Exec to a desktop machine with a removable disk drive. I can do 2.4 GB in a little over an hour. You should be able to do 300 MB of data in less than 15 minutes.
Frankly, with that amount of data I would keep things simple and just do full backups but it does require somewhat reasonable speed. (Though almost anything is faster than those over-rated "super-floppies".

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Charles M. Kozierok
Webslave, The PC Guide (http://www.PCGuide.com)
Comprehensive PC Reference, Troubleshooting, Optimization and Buyer's Guides...
Note: Please reply to my forum postings here on the forums. Thanks.

[Paleo Pete]

I second that. With backups that small, I'd just stick to a full back up. I wonder why they give you backup capabilities only to tape, then fail to provide access to a tape drive? Talk to the Network Administrator about that.
Don't know about the program you're using, but with Microsoft Backup, included with Win98, you can set it to append to previous backups, only backing up new files. It's Seagate's Back up Exec, by the way, for all practical purposes. I don't know if it's included with NT or not, never did any back ups when I was using NT a couple of years ago, the shop owner did that. I just backed up my system.
I think the super floppies are mostly overrated too. The LS 120 is pretty good, and works as a standard 1.44MB A: drive too, but I'm not sure how reliable the media is, or how slow it is. Wouldn't have a zip drive...


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[Tezz54]

Thanks for your replies. I think I may have found what I need with a program called Backup2001 from Atypie. It has a scheduler, works off the archive bit, and writes a discrete archive every time. I do not expect my backup requirements to grow much further. Most of my data is on the Network anyway, it's just my travelling files I want to protect.

So, I'm now backing up daily to the network. My daily archives get backed up by the network. This thing could crash at anytime and I wouldn't care!

Cheers!

Tezz