CDRW - obsolete for backups?

Am I missing something, or has CDRW just about gone the way of
floppies when it comes to backing up these huge hard drives? Doing an
image backup can take dozens of CDs. DVDs would make the process less
cumbersone, but even they may not have enough capacity these days.
With the availability of DVDRW, jump drives, and relatively cheap
internal and external hard drives, is CDRW on its way to becoming
obsolete?

"Howard Kaikow" wrote:
Use external USB or Firewire hard drives for full/regular backup.
Use CD-RW/DVD for partial backups, i.e., for specific files.

Or maybe use jump drives, they're getting pretty cheap now...

Second hard drives are one of the least expensive options for backups. I
backup only data files and can easily backup to one DVD+RW. If my HD
crashes I would prefer to install clean or restore a clean disk image stored
on my second hard drive and then restore only data files. My personal
preference.

--
--------------------------------------------------
"24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence? I think not."
-Stephen Wright

"Steve" wrote in message
news
Am I missing something, or has CDRW just about gone the way of
floppies when it comes to backing up these huge hard drives? Doing an
image backup can take dozens of CDs. DVDs would make the process less
cumbersone, but even they may not have enough capacity these days.
With the availability of DVDRW, jump drives, and relatively cheap
internal and external hard drives, is CDRW on its way to becoming
obsolete?

Use external USB or Firewire hard drives for full/regular backup.
Use CD-RW/DVD for partial backups, i.e., for specific files.

For example, I have a ZIP disk always available to which I copy files on
which I am actively working.
CD-RW/DVD could be used instead of the ZIP.


--
http://www.standards.com/; See Howard Kaikow's web site.
"Steve" wrote in message
news
Am I missing something, or has CDRW just about gone the way of
floppies when it comes to backing up these huge hard drives? Doing an
image backup can take dozens of CDs. DVDs would make the process less
cumbersone, but even they may not have enough capacity these days.
With the availability of DVDRW, jump drives, and relatively cheap
internal and external hard drives, is CDRW on its way to becoming
obsolete?

Steve wrote:
Am I missing something, or has CDRW just about gone the way of
floppies when it comes to backing up these huge hard drives? Doing an
image backup can take dozens of CDs. DVDs would make the process less
cumbersone, but even they may not have enough capacity these days.
With the availability of DVDRW, jump drives, and relatively cheap
internal and external hard drives, is CDRW on its way to becoming
obsolete?


Yes and no. If you partition the drive(s) wisely, CD-ROM is an excellent
backup medium. If you dump everything into one huge drive, nothing much
will do the job well. That is, you can back up to DVD or another HD with
much pain, but you won't be able to afford the time to do it often
enough or for defragging, searching, etc.

There's a page on my approach to backup in the primer at my WWW site.
FYI: I back up the two partitions which require it at least once a week.
Each takes one CD-R. I have a total of 160 GB in my primary system.

Mike
--

http://www.mrichter.com/

I too use a USB 2.0 External hard drive for backups. I keep all of my data
on a share on my network and use robocopy from the windows 2000 resource kit
to mirror the directory structure. I fire up my USB 2.0 drive for about 5
minutes once a week and get a backup of everything that has changed.


"Steve" wrote in message
news
Am I missing something, or has CDRW just about gone the way of
floppies when it comes to backing up these huge hard drives? Doing an
image backup can take dozens of CDs. DVDs would make the process less
cumbersone, but even they may not have enough capacity these days.
With the availability of DVDRW, jump drives, and relatively cheap
internal and external hard drives, is CDRW on its way to becoming
obsolete?

"Patrick L. Parks" wrote:
I too use a USB 2.0 External hard drive for backups. I keep all of my data
on a share on my network and use robocopy from the windows 2000 resource kit
to mirror the directory structure. I fire up my USB 2.0 drive for about 5
minutes once a week and get a backup of everything that has changed.

Will Ghost write directly to an external HD?

"Steve" wrote in message
...
"Patrick L. Parks" wrote:
I too use a USB 2.0 External hard drive for backups. I keep all of my
data
on a share on my network and use robocopy from the windows 2000 resource
kit
to mirror the directory structure. I fire up my USB 2.0 drive for about
5
minutes once a week and get a backup of everything that has changed.

Will Ghost write directly to an external HD?


Yes

Craig

"Steve" wrote in message
news
Am I missing something, or has CDRW just about gone the way of
floppies when it comes to backing up these huge hard drives? Doing an
image backup can take dozens of CDs. DVDs would make the process less
cumbersone, but even they may not have enough capacity these days.
With the availability of DVDRW, jump drives, and relatively cheap
internal and external hard drives, is CDRW on its way to becoming
obsolete?

It depends on what you're trying to do. In most business environments, the
CDRW doesn't make sense (and maybe never did).

Were you speaking about home use??? For home use, the CDRW might or might
not be useful ...

Determine what you're backing up, and why ... what condition is the backup
protecting you from? Determine what you'll need to restore, and under what
circumstances.

If you are guarding against the possibility of a disk crash, perhaps you
could just backup the "user data" portion of your disk(s). When you replace
the dead drive, you can install the OS portion and applications from the
original CDs. That's a lot of trouble, but remember to balance the cost and
effort of recovery against the liklihood that you'll ever need to recover a
crashed disk.

If you're protecting against the possibility that you might accidentally
delete some files and then want to recover them, the same holds true ...
just backup your unique content, and recover the backup should the need
arise. Often, a full backup of selected directory trees will fit on a CD,
and incremental backups will be even smaller.

The situation becomes more complex if you keep gigabytes of MP3s or MPEGs in
on-line storage. These should really be on CD (or DVD) anyway. If not, then
backing them up to CDRW makes little sense.

Replacing the CDRW with a DVD-writer changes the situation by a factor of 8
or 9 ... they're bigger by that ratio. But the thinking remains the same.

In article ,
says...
Use external USB or Firewire hard drives for full/regular backup.
Use CD-RW/DVD for partial backups, i.e., for specific files.

For example, I have a ZIP disk always available to which I copy files on
which I am actively working.
CD-RW/DVD could be used instead of the ZIP.



I use a Buslink external USB 2 drive with Dantz Retrospect.
I back up every night by turning on the drive and double
clicking a Dantz icon on my desktop. I brush my teeth,
come back and turn off the computer.

Fortunately I've not had to restore the entire drive but I
have restored many files very easily.

Louise