Steve's Ravin' Reviews
~~Steve Mills

BACKUP SOFTWARE (and suggestions)

This Month's Coverage:

• Directory Compare ... 5 geezers
• PolderBackup ... 5 geezers

If there’s one thing to say about this month’s column, it’s BORING! 

That is – until you need it!! Since I used to work for an ISP, I developed a healthy appreciation for multiple backups and multiple methods. There’s no worse feeling about 3:00 am than an Error Reading Tape message and you have one set of tapes. 

Backup quality and redundancy is expensive and most of us just don’t have the resources to devote to absolute reliability. Money aside, here are things I would consider: 

• A work and a play machine – I no longer have this and really miss it. It was great to have a test machine where I could blow away everything, reformat and start over. The work machine only had safe stuff.

• Drives in a RAID 5 system – without being too technical, this gave protection against a drive failing and maintained uptime with no restore. Actually, with today’s cheap hard drives this becomes closer to viable for the home/casual user. 

• A good, high capacity tape drive, with good software and a daily, complete backup. One tape should be large enough to hold a complete backup. Additionally, there should be a regular rotation to maintain a complete set of tapes in another location. 

•  A good UPS.

OK OK!! Now we know how Billy Gates backs up, but how do we maintain some degree of data integrity with the little bit of money we have left after buying his software? Some thoughts: 

• A simple set of mirrored drives. Today’s cheap hardware makes this very doable. Basically you have two drives performing exactly the same function. When (not if) one disk dies, the other disk continues until the bad one is replaced. A real drawback here is any corruption is replicated on the other drive. This is why I tend to mirror a drive and then break the mirror (i.e. just duplicate the drive and tell the mirroring hardware to treat it as a separate drive). If you do this weekly, you’ll always have a complete set up no older than 7 days.

• Decent software and a tape drive. I’m lucky enough to have an 8 gig DAT tape drive, but today’s huge software make it woefully inefficient. I use BackUpMyPC software by Stomp – formerly owned by Veritas – bought from Seagate etc. etc. It is a capable solution if you have time to pump 4 or 5 tapes through. Unfortunately, the very nice Disaster Recovery feature doesn’t work in XP.

• Keep your most important poop in a separate directory and use one of the following tools to synchronize that directory and duplicate your data on a CDRW, other hard drive, Zip etc. This month’s programs offer a wide range of features, Directory Compare is the best for synchronizing and PolderBackup excels in directory backup. I use em both.

• Keep copies of all upgrade patches for your software on a separate CD. It’s a real pain to to update all of your software from the web. I also keep a directory of XP drivers which I also synchronize regularly.

Next month has some neat graphics stuff – come back!

Your suggestions are welcome and encouraged. (steve@inil.com)  

Take Care…..

Steve  

Program: Directory Compare

Version and Date: 2.53     11/18/01

Author: Juan M. Aguirregabiria

Web Site

License: Freeware

Rating: 5 Geezers  

In the author’s words:  

Directory Compare is a utility to help you keeping copies of your important directories (documents, programs under development and so on) in a backup hard disk or any other storage system (like 100Mb diskettes), as well as in a compressed .zip file. The backup may be made automatically (in unattended mode) or by using a friendly user interface. I always have two or more copies of my important documents and I refresh them very often. I prefer to save exact copies of my working directories (rather than using some backup program, because it is faster and makes easier to open the old copy to recover some element or part that was better in the previous version. To make this process easier I wrote many years ago the first version of the program cpy which is included with my Console Utilities. It is a command line program, which makes it very convenient to use from a desktop shortcut that after a single click copies to my backup hard disk all modified elements in my working directories. Users that do not want to remember command lines options may use Cmd Line Shell to have a more user-friendly interface. Directory Compare is a kind or GUI version of cpy: it has far less options but its visual interface makes easier selective copies. For instance, modern compilers generate an incredible amount of auxiliary data, which speeds up compilation, but takes a lot of storage space.  (For instance, the source files of Directory Compare are less than100 Kb, but the auxiliary files generated by the compiler occupy 7,500 Kb!) Usually you do not want this kind of auxiliary files in your backup disk: they are very large and can be easily recreated by running the compiler. cpy may be instructed to ask you for confirmation before copying each file, but this is a boring and error prone process. My strategy is to have cpy copy everything during program development and when a version is released, I delete from my main and backup disks auxiliary files. To improve this approach I have written Directory Compare: it will show you side by side the source and backup directories so that you can easily select the files to by copied (from the source to the target or in both directories) and even delete from both directories auxiliary files.  

Program: PolderBackup

Version and Date: 2.03     01/29/02

Author: Gerwin

Web Site

License: Freeware

Rating: 5 Geezers  

In the author’s words:  

PolderBackup is getting serious! Because of overwhelming response to my call for support of the Polderweg Animal Wellfare organization, I decided to develop this version to celebrate their 100th anniversary. It can zip and unzip now, comes with a restore function. PolderBackup is an easy to use backup tool with a good array of features that will meet most basic backup needs. You can select directories and files to be backed up and save them as templates, so you can keep multiple backup sets and only start the one you need. The program supports recursive directories, file filters and moving redundant files to the recycle bin. Your backup process is clearly documented, all steps of the way are logged and accessible from the interface. That way you can be certain that the backup was successful. Very easy to use. Supports command line options, and is very pro-cats!.  

I’ll admit to taking the easy way in describing these programs, but the authors' descriptions were so well done, I said why not?  As much as I loathe Roxio, I do find their DirectCD software very nice. I synchronize regularly between my ImportantStuff Directory and the CDRW drive. And…. having graduated Magna Cum Laude from Anal U., I regularly rotate the CDRW disks.  

To repeat myself – BE REDUNDANT!  

Final Thought:  

If a man says something and a woman doesn’t hear him, is he still wrong?

Steve Mills has been reviewing software in different capacities for many years.  He has recently left his job with a search engine consulting firm and is looking for a new adventure.