CDRW - obsolete for backups?

Some third party apps (Handy Backup for instance) allows compression
along with CD-spanning.

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?

Backing up to an external drive sounds good, but when the time comes
to do a restore, how do you get your BIOS to recognize the external
drive? Is it as simple as adding the external drive's driver to a boot
floppy?

Quinoa S

gdkucera wrote in message . ..
Some third party apps (Handy Backup for instance) allows compression
along with CD-spanning.

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?

"Quinoa S" wrote in message
om...
Backing up to an external drive sounds good, but when the time comes
to do a restore, how do you get your BIOS to recognize the external
drive? Is it as simple as adding the external drive's driver to a boot
floppy?

In the case of Retrospect, Rretrospect provides for th ecreation of a
disaster recovery CD that installs a temporary OS.
--
http://www.standards.com/; See Howard Kaikow's web site.

I would never attempt to restore an operating system from backup.

I would always reload Windows/Linux from the original source cd's and then
install my external hard drive to restore my data. I only backup data to
the external drive.


"Quinoa S" wrote in message
om...
Backing up to an external drive sounds good, but when the time comes
to do a restore, how do you get your BIOS to recognize the external
drive? Is it as simple as adding the external drive's driver to a boot
floppy?

Quinoa S

gdkucera wrote in message
. ..
Some third party apps (Handy Backup for instance) allows compression
along with CD-spanning.

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?

"Patrick L. Parks" wrote:

I would never attempt to restore an operating system from backup.

If you mean a file-by-file back up, I'd certainly agree. However, a
partition back up made from outside the OS saves a *hell* of a lot of time.
More than once I've been glad I could do a complete OS (including installed
applications) restore in ten-odd minutes. I can't see any reason not to take
advantage of this convenience when the partiton image is a duplicate of what
I installed in the first place.

Rick.
-+---

http://www.alienshore.com/seeking/

"Winey" wrote:

Funny that no one, not a single person out of the 13 replies
posted so far, has mentioned tape backup.

Tried it and found its stability lacking. It was a crap-shoot as to whether
the data would be there when I needed it. I tried a QIC-40 drive initially,
then an Exabyte 8mm drive (an 8500 if memory serves)later but I couldn't
depend on either enough to make it all worth it.

With tape, and a decent backup progrm (e.g. Dantz) you
can store multiple generations of backup. With HD
backup, you're limited to the last backup you made.

Until I recently bought a DVD writer, I would do a complete backup of my
data partition with Ghost every six months. I had five complete backups on
my second system's hard drive. Even if I didn't use Ghost and copied the
files, it's a simple matter to used multipe directories off the root of the
backup drive to store multiple copies of the drive to be backed up. Simple
really...

And, I can make an extra copy of critical data that I
store "offsite," say at my office.

No problem with other media as well...and even a whole hard drive can be
taken off site.

Rick.
-+---

http://www.alienshore.com/seeking/

CDRW has *never* been a practical backup strategy for doing full backups.
Since when has anyone had a 640MB hard drive???? As with floppies, super
drives and ZIP disks, it was a cost effective way to get a backup. Reality
ended up being that people never did it because it took so damned long and
you had to be there to put in a new media (LOTS of new media).

Tapes have long been the backup of choice, but again, there is the fact that
it takes *FOREVER* to backup and verify and an eternity if you want to
restore a single file...

These days, as another poster said, the best, safest and quickest method
(IMHO) is an external drive using USB2. Cost is reasonable, installation is
a snap, and backup is automated. Total backup time (including verification)
for about 20GB is about 1 1/2 hours. Our tape backup at work (backing up
40GB from multiple servers) takes over 24 hours! My home system is
automatically backed up every Sunday at 10AM with no intervention required
from me. I can even be working at the time.

--
Regards,
Hank Arnold

"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?

The latest version will (Norton Ghost 2003).

--
Regards,
Hank Arnold

"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?

Same with Ghost

--
Regards,
Hank Arnold

"Howard Kaikow" wrote in message
...
"Quinoa S" wrote in message
om...
Backing up to an external drive sounds good, but when the time comes
to do a restore, how do you get your BIOS to recognize the external
drive? Is it as simple as adding the external drive's driver to a boot
floppy?

In the case of Retrospect, Rretrospect provides for th ecreation of a
disaster recovery CD that installs a temporary OS.
--
http://www.standards.com/; See Howard Kaikow's web site.

Sounds good unless you:

- are not a techie.....

- are a business recovering from a hard drive crash.....

--
Regards,
Hank Arnold

"Patrick L. Parks" wrote in message
news
I would never attempt to restore an operating system from backup.

I would always reload Windows/Linux from the original source cd's and then
install my external hard drive to restore my data. I only backup data to
the external drive.