Question : Problem: Recommendations for backup solution

Hi,

What solution would you recommend for regular backup of a personal system? My system is an AMD Athlon XP 2200 running XP Home. I currently have around 20 GB of documents and emails that I would like to back up on daily-weekly basis. I have a DVD-RW drive which I have intended to use as the primary backup medium. However, I'm open to other solutions as well.

What I'd want from the backup solution is briefly the following:
* Easy definition of backup jobs with Explorer-like UI for selction of folders and files to include; wildcard-based selection and filtering within the selected folders would also be useful
* Scheduling of backup jobs
* Ability to have multiple backup jobs with different schedules
* Backing up to various media including DVD
* Verification of backed-up files
* Selection between full, differential or incremental backup
* Compression
* Preferably storing backed-up files as individual files so that they can be viewed and recovered also without the backup software (unless compressed)
* Ability to view and edit backup job definitions after they've been created (add/remove files or folders)
* Reliable performance

I have been using Nero BackItUp which came with the DVD drive but I'm not entirely happy with it. It particularly fails on the last two points above. Jobs cannot be edited after they've been created. Above all, the performance has not been reliable. It occasionally skips files and the scheduled running of backup jobs also seems failure-prone. It seems that after some time, scheduled jobs are not run anymore and have to be re-created. The problem may of course not only be in the software -- part of the problem may also be in the system environment or between the keyboard and the backrest. ;-) However, if you know about a backup solution that you have found to work well - better than Nero - then I'd be interested in hearing about it.

Thanks for any advice,

Fred

Answer : Problem: Recommendations for backup solution

Get yourself a USB hard drive and backup to that.  Easiest, fastest, best route to go in my opinion.

As for software, I use the built in Windows backup program.

> * Easy definition of backup jobs with Explorer-like UI for selction of
> folders and files to include [YES]; wildcard-based selection and filtering
> within the selected folders would also be useful [NO]
> * Scheduling of backup jobs [YES]
> * Ability to have multiple backup jobs with different schedules [YES]
> * Backing up to various media including DVD [Tape and standard drives only (not DVD/CD)]
> * Verification of backed-up files [YES]
> * Selection between full, differential or incremental backup [YES]
> * Compression [NO - based on Veritas Backup Exec, Veritas stripped out the Compression routines]
> * Preferably storing backed-up files as individual files so that they [NO, but the windows backup utility works quite well and you easily have it on every XP/2000/2003 system; (some XP systems - Home - don't have it or don't have it installed - google search for NTBACKUP.MSI will locate a downloadable copy for you)]
> can be viewed and recovered also without the backup software (unless compressed) [NO, see above]
> * Ability to view and edit backup job definitions after they've been [YES]
> created (add/remove files or folders)
> * Reliable performance [YES, I've never seen a problem when backing up to disk - note: you need to use NTFS formatted drives to save files over 4 GB and since NTBACKUP saves in a .bkf file that could be that large or larger, you need to use NTFS on your external drive.]


Otherwise, you may be able to find some software that does this - else you can script it using robocopy or xcopy to pretty much do everything you wanted to do.