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Data Storage Software

Backups to CD-R? 106

Posted by Cliff from the anything-but-tape dept.
Lumpish Scholar asks: "Backups are important, so we should tell our friends and family to buy a bunch of CD-Rs and...what? The operating system most of them are stuck with comes with backup software, but 'Windows Backup Does Not Back Up to CD-R, CD-RW, or DVD-R Devices (this behavior is by design). I've looked in the obvious places, but nothing comes across as better than adequate. There's got to be something that can do full or incremental backups (which in part means keeping track of what's already been backed up), that can back up files bigger than a single CD-R, and that's relatively fast and easy. What have you used to solve this problem, for yourself or others, for Windows or for better operating systems?"
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Backups to CD-R? More

Backups to CD-R?

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  • you know (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Unknown Poltroon ( 31628 ) *
    WHy the hell dosent windos allow backup to CDR? Any rational reason?

    • Re:you know (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Nimey ( 114278 )
      RTFA.

    • Re:you know (Score:4, Insightful)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @09:42PM (#10483313) Homepage
      Probably because Windows XP's inherent burning system isn't as well hooked into the OS as HDD-based removable media. They just got the whole CD-as-floppy paradigm with XP, and it doesn't exactly work right yet. Go ahead, try to save this page to your CDR drive.

      Didn't work, did it? Explorer is doing all kinds of fancy footwork to make it appear as if you're copying files onto the drive, then burning them, when under the hood you're just copying to a local cache on drive C.

      Essentially, their CDR implementation is incomplete, and therefore it would be a pain to implement full backup to it. Add to that file splitting and management, and why not just hold off on that feature until Longhorn.

      • What does the explorers burning ability have to do with the back up softwares's ability to use CD media just as it would a tape?

        CD burning in XP is crappy but this shouldn't be that hard to accomplish.
    • I suspect someone said the same thing about a Web Browser so MS created and gave away IE. Then they got sued, again and again and again...

      • Microsoft has been bundling applications and utilities with their OS ever since DOS Version 1, but rarely ever has been sued for that explicit reason. This should lead you to question your cause-and-effect scenario, that MS gets sued merely for offering free software. With a little more investigation and intellectual honesty, you would discover that the complaints are due to the conditions MS imposes when it provides its "free" software.

        But, there is another point, too. MS has long offered backup softwar

  • For Linux/FreeBSD/etc. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Rikus ( 765448 )
    I use cpio, tar, and/or pax to archive files into a big ball, then encrypt that ball and burn it to CD (suitable for storing in an untrusted location). tar has builtin date checking, to determine which files need to be backed up, but cpio and pax are much more flexible in that they take a list of files from stdin, so you can use a more advanced routine to determine which files have changed.

    I wrote a little shell script to wrap this all into a convenient command, and I'm sure many others have as well.

  • Could be worse (Score:4, Insightful)

    by skinfitz ( 564041 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @07:04PM (#10482462) Journal
    Mac OSX has no backup at ALL. (ditto doesn't count).

    If you spring for '.Mac' you get a crappy buggy backup program, however by default the OS has no backup mechanism whatsoever aside from copying files.

    Yes OSX is essentially BSD but you can't even simply use tar as it won't store the weird resource fork data from the HFS+ filing system.

    About the simplest way to do it is using DiskUtility to make a virtual disk image and copy data into that using ditto, however this is rather longwinded and a simple Apple supported backup utility supplied with the OS would be greatly appreciated.

  • Nero BackItUp (Score:5, Informative)

    by It's People! ( 819150 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @07:08PM (#10482489)
    Although I've never used it before, Nero BackItUp [nero.com] appears to do what you're looking for. I've bought Ahead's software many times before, and their quality is fairly good. There's a trial version, too.

    • partimage = free (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      http://www.partimage.org [partimage.org]

      It'll backup across a network or to pretty much whatever you want. Also you can make a boot disk and use it to back up a non-Linux OS.

  • Keep it simple (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Masa ( 74401 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @07:19PM (#10482551) Journal
    Just put everything under one folder (for example "%USERPROFILE%\My Documents") and right-click the folder and just "send-to" to the CD Burner (at least under Windows XP). Shouldn't be hard to burn the whole directory hierarchy once in the while. I think this should be enough for majority of the home users who cannot figure out themselves, how to create more sophisticated backup scripts.

    • Re:Keep it simple (Score:3, Informative)

      by dstillz ( 704959 )
      That would work fine if people didn't have 10GB+ "My Music" subfolders. :-D Even for 650MB of data or less, the WinXP burning wizard SUCKS, because it has to cache every file that it's going to copy to CD. On a one-disk, one-partition system, this is both absurd and slow. It then does what seems like more duplication during the "adding data to the CD image" phase. I'm no fan of Ahead/Nero's CD burning or backup software, but using either, you can have the first (or only) disk of your backup set burned
      • The Nero backup software also has the advantage that if you turn off the compression option, the actualy files are burnt as a standard filesystem, so in emergency you can still get at them without the backup software installed.

  • Use Norton Ghost (Score:5, Informative)

    by scupper ( 687418 ) * on Saturday October 09, 2004 @07:29PM (#10482597) Homepage
    Norton Ghost [symantec.com] is what I use for multi-disk CD-R backups [symantec.com].

    • Re:Use Norton Ghost (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BrookHarty ( 9119 )
      Mod this up, Ghost has been the best backup for some time...

      Myself, I just rar up My Documents with a recovery file and burn to CD. In fact, I rar up 700 meg sized files if I need to split over cds, and make the thing self extractable. Just put in the first cd and go. I'd use DVD, but after numerous dvd-/+r's, I still sometimes get coasters, I havnt had coasters on CD's in years.

      Now for incremental backups, youre looking into costly software. Enough cost, it might be cheaper to pick up a USB HD.

      I just w

      • Re:Use Norton Ghost (Score:5, Informative)

        by dgmartin98 ( 576409 ) <slashdotusername@@@gmail...com> on Sunday October 10, 2004 @12:33AM (#10484034)
        Incremental backups with RAR are easy. Use the command line version of RAR with:
        -ao Add files with Archive attribute set
        -ac Clear Archive attribute after compression or extraction

        In fact, here's the contents of my "incremental" batch file:

        rar a -agYYYY-MM-DD -u -ao -ac -as -ep2 -m2 -os -ow -r -ri3 -rr2p -ds -x@IgnoreList_Docs.txt D:\Backups\Weekly\Files_Docs_.rar @BackupList_Docs.txt

        I run that once a week, PGP-encrypt the file, burn to CD or DVD, and store off-site. I include an ignore list, and a list of files to backup.

        For a "full" backup, I use a batch file with this in it (same as above without the -ao):

        rar a -agYYYY-MM-DD -u -ac -as -ep2 -m2 -os -ow -r -ri3 -rr2p -ds -x@IgnoreList_Docs.txt D:\Backups\Weekly\Files_Docs_.rar @BackupList_Docs.txt

        If your directories to backup are large, you can use the option -v[k|b|f|m|M] to pick the volume size.

      • Hmmm. $69 is kind of spendy. Especially for a program that requires activation, so it may or may not work when you need it a few years down the road.

      • Re:Use Norton Ghost (Score:4, Informative)

        by TheLink ( 130905 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @11:45AM (#10486434) Journal
        "I just wish I could back up 200+ gig HD's to disc of some kind. "

        You can. It's called another 200GB HDD.

        Seriously at USD0.50/GB it's not such a bad idea (compared to tape or other alternatives). Get one of those HDD tray/rack thingies so you can remove/add it easily.

        Would be great if cheap SATA hotswappable HDD trays/bays become widely available.

        • Uh... tape is usually around USD0.35/GB. It's just that 200G backups take a lot of tapes, not that it's expensive.

          • Which tape formats are you talking about?

            The tapes don't come with tape drives. The tape drives are often expensive (many cost as much as six or more 200GB HDDs). If you're talking about a format where 200GB = a lot of tapes, tape autoloaders are even more expensive.

            Price isn't the only cost, AFAIK most of these tape drives are slow - you'd take from 10 to 20 hours (or more) to backup 200GB assuming zero time taken to load and unload tapes. Whereas HDDs are 10x faster. When the time comes to restore from

    • Re:Use Norton Ghost (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Jamesie ( 615784 )
      Ghost is excellent for full image backups, I use it to backup to a spare hard disk and dvd and the images are browsable if you need to restore individual files.
      If you have a network or just a pc and a laptop you can easily backup over the network to any pc.

      I back up my system and data partitions only, I keep all my mp3's and images on a third partition and archive those seperately.

      Apart from that I have a 1gig thumb drive that I regularly copy my main documents to.

    • Try Acronis. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @07:31AM (#10485326) Homepage

      For full image backups, try Acronis [acronis.com]. Symantec learned customer care from Microsoft, it appears.

      With Acronis, you can make a full system drive backup of Windows XP while Windows is running.

      Last time I checked, Ghost was VERY quirky.

      --
      U.S. Gov.: Borrowing [brillig.com] money to kill Iraqis [iraqbodycount.net]. 140 billion borrowed [costofwar.com]. With interest, you pay 200 billion.
      • Last time I checked, Ghost was VERY quirky.

        Quirky? How? I have been using it for a few years now and have had no quirks!
        Unlike Acronis, Ghost does reboot into dos if you want to back up the system drive but I wouldn't call that quirky, just cautious.


        • Acronis works perfectly when making backups from inside Windows XP. I've used it with several different motherboards (about 8 different kinds).

          I don't have time to discuss the quirkiness of Ghost. However, the quirkiness was verified by Symantec technical support. I was told that many other people had discussed the same issues. If you know Ghost already, it is probably easy. I found reading the disorganized Ghost manual quite time-consuming. I find Symantec technical support very abusive and ignorant.
        • I like Ghost, but haven't used it in a while. Can it write to NTFS yet? If not then I am limited to 4 GB files and that isn't handy anymore. Also, does it support external USB and Firewire drives well? Last time I used it did not. Those are my only questions.

          JOhn
          • It's been able to write to NTFS for a while and I have seen the tabs for external drive support but I don't use external drives, so presumably that's been added and works (I am an optomist).
  • I wrote a little bash script to automate the job. It works on linux and other UN*X-like systems. Actually all it does is write out tarballs in CD sized chunks, then you just burn the .tar files to CD. Because backups may span multiple tapes, tar has some legacy code that lets you span multiple backup destinations. The downside you can't use compression with spanned tars. The upside is if one of your backup tars fails you can still recover the rest of your data (the spanned tars are not dependent on one

  • Backup to CD-R under Windows (Score:5, Informative)

    by lil_nohreaga ( 725416 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @07:59PM (#10482781)
    I've used http://www.handybackup.com/ [handybackup.com] for several clients and have been very pleased with the results thus far. It allows you to backup to cd-r, network, or ftp and allows the backup to be scheduled in a wide variety of ways.
  • I wrote a perl script to do it all for me, then didnt use it for a couple months, fell hundreds of gigabytes behind, and gave up again.
    Now waiting for somebody to make a consumer-level WORM drive designed for constant use- 99% of my data I never change, I suspect it's true for most people (You needed all that space to install [insert product] and the files it creates are < 10MB.. what WORM options are there? I mean, other than two DVD-R drives and a robotic 200-disc changer.. right now it seems much chea
  • http://www.handybackup.com/

    I set it up for some friends and it's worked well. Scheduling, automatic backups, backups to just about anything (CD/DVD/FTP/filesystem location), multivolume backups. Cheap, too.
  • He knows all [wsj.com] and speaks in a way that doesn't make thier eyes gloss over.

  • Second Copy (Score:3, Informative)

    by rueger ( 210566 ) * on Saturday October 09, 2004 @09:04PM (#10483119) Homepage
    Although we use it to backup files to a networked PC,not to CDR, we have been very happy with Second Copy [secondcopy.com].

    It's affordable at $29.95 for one user, with bulk pricing for multiuser environments.

    It's easy to use, will backup or synchronize files or directories, and works well over a network. And yes, it will back up to CDR. Right now we use it to backup and or sync five systems. Run it once daily and Bob's Yer Uncle.

  • Retrospect Express (Score:3, Informative)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @09:16PM (#10483174) Homepage
    I normally use Retrospect Express [dantz.com] for desktop backups.

    Burns to CDR, fast, super-easy to use, and has some excellent scheduling features.

    • Re:Retrospect Express (Score:3, Informative)

      by Detritus ( 11846 )
      I use it for both Windows and Mac OS X. It works great.

      Check their hardware compatibility list before you buy it. It can be picky about backup hardware. It uses CD/DVD features that are not always implemented fully or properly on some drives.

  • DFIncBackup (Score:3, Informative)

    by Sandman1971 ( 516283 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @09:46PM (#10483332) Homepage Journal
    In my windows boxes, I use a freeware program called DFIncBackup [dfincbackup.net]. Does full, incremental, etc... to any media (including network shares, DVD, CDR, etc...). You can also indicate file extensions to backup, or ignore, split large archives, backup to zip file, create templates, etc... Probably one of the best in freeware (and shareware and pay). I've had to restore only once, and it worked flawlessly.
  • Dantz Retrospect [dantz.com] has a good UI, should be fairly easy for somewhat savvy users.
  • Buy a couple of 60 GB drives and removable trays.

    Done.
  • The simplest, non-incremental solution, is to boot some form of Linux. I chose RIP [tux.org] last time I had to do this. I don't remember if it had cdrecord, but it had reiser4, captive-ntfs, and loaded everything into RAM on boot (fairly quickly) so that you could eject the disk. The script, though ugly, can be understood well enough to set up your own backup script which runs each boot.

    As for the backup itself, I just used tar, piped the compressed version straight into cdrecord, using stdin and a huge buffer.
    • The AskSlashdot question was for a simple backup method that can be used by (presumably non-tech) friends. Booting linux and using "tar, cdredord, stdin, and a huge buffer" is probably too much for the typical user who just wants to save his emails and photos.

  • if you have a few PCs... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This might end up lost in oblivion since I'm posting as AC, but just in case...

    I run several PCs, older ones of which were basically free because they use cast-off hardware from when I upgraded my main PC.

    Then, HD space is about the cheapest backup you can get. I use rdist to sync things between several PCs, which act as mutual live backups to each other.

    It generally works very well: the chance if all HDs failing at once is really small. On the other hand, you do also have disadvantages compared to CD

  • I use Carbon Copy Cloner [bombich.com] on my PowerBook to mirror my entire hard drive to an external 60 GB USB 2.0 hard drive. CCC is supposed to make external drives bootable as well, but I've had trouble getting it to do that.

    It's not the ideal solution, since it obviously means that if any data on my PowerBook's HD gets corrupted, I'll just be cloning over that corruption. I'm probably going to start doing separate backups to CD-R and/or CD-RW to ensure additional data integrity. But I do like the simplicity of h

  • I love my Iomega Rev [iomega.com]! [insert clicking sound here :P ] No seriusly I havnt had a single problem with it. and the filesystem is the open [sourceforge.net] starndard [dret.net] and avalible to windows mac and linux alike UDF [webopedia.com] filesystem.
  • Seriously, there's got to be decent backup software for Windows, especially considering how many corporate environments it's used in. It's a pretty common and critical piece of software.

    On the Mac there's Retrospect among others. Toast will also do incremental backups to CD. Also, it's not hard to do a search for all documents modified after some date and back them up if you really want to do it that way. On the Mac, it'd be pretty easy to encapsulate in an AppleScript, although I realize it's not everyone
    • A lot of corporate environments choose network backup if anything.

      Retrospect is also on the PC. I assume that EZ CD Creator (also by Adaptec (just as with Toast)) will do incremental backups. If not, other CD software (such as Nero) will.

      I have found Unix backups to usually use the same things as Amanda: tar and/or dump.

      I think the poster was just trolling for some free/cheap suggestions & I think he's been give a few.
  • I have a task-scheduled Windows Scripting Host script that runs NTBackup, zips it, defrags it, tests the zip, then exports the registry and does the same to that. It does this early in the morning just after the PC turns itself on, while I'm not using it.

    It finally takes an sha1 of the job lot, and I then fire up Easy CD Creator and burn the lot to CD, finally verifying the sha1 sum.

    I've been thinking about getting a few USB 2 external hard drive enclosures and using them.
    But for the moment I have plenty
  • Insert DVD #1 of N, boot machine.
    Enter some basic info
    Confirm full restore
    Swap disks as needed
    Reboot

    None of this: install XP, then SP1, then drivers for your video card, then IE 6.1.666, then your backup/restore sw, then restore overwriting the Registry, reboot, blue screen, reboot in safe mode, reboot again, done.

    I just moved an XP install from 1 disk to another using this hideous, kludgy method.

  • Acronis TrueImage saves my butt regularly (Score:3, Informative)

    by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @08:12AM (#10485451)
    I wouldn't do this for any other commercial program, but I really have to sing the praises of Acronis TrueImage. It really makes me feel safe in this world of flaky hardware.

    The principle behind it is that it backs up entire partitions so that they can be reconstituted bit-for-bit as they were when the backup was made. Since version 7, there has been an option to do incremental backups. The compression ratio is wonderful. I have a 2GB partition with Windows XP and all the Windows programs that I use, and the image file that TrueImage makes of it fits on a 700MB CD! What's more, you can burn a recovery CD that boots directly (TrueImage is based on Linux) and has full backup/restore functionality. Oh, and in Windows you can "mount" the backed-up partition images so that they appear as a read-only drive with its own letter--in case you just need to recover a couple of files from a backup and not the whole thing. Really, I don't know what they'll do for 8.0, because I think 7.0 is just about the perfect backup program, and it's so easy that even a lazy guy like me has developed good habits about backups.

  • If CDBurnerXP [cdburnerxp.se] supports backing up yet, but I think we can expect it to be in future versions of the software. It's a good free alternative to Nero and the developers are pretty responsive to new feature requests so it's worth keeping in mind.

  • I use knoppix and dd (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheLink ( 130905 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @10:01AM (#10485926) Journal
    You need another HDD or a fileserver (with network).

    Assuming you want to backup first ata hdd on target system.

    Boot Knoppix on system to be backed up-
    Use:
    knoppix 2 noswap
    or
    knoppix noswap
    (latter if you have enough ram + cpu and you still want to browse the web etc whilst backing up ;) ).

    Then mount the drive/share you want to put the backups to.
    e.g. mount -t smbfs -o username=blah //fileserver/backup /mnt/test

    or mount /dev/hdc /mnt/test (if have another hdd).

    mkdir /mnt/test/20041010

    dd if=/dev/hda bs=131072 | lzop -c | split -b 650m - /mnt/test/20041010/machinename-hda-lzo-

    This creates files that are 650MB in size. You can burn these to CD-Rs. I prefer to leave a bit of unused space at the CD-R's edge (some seem to peel off there).

    Note: that there are reports that dd in linux in some cases doesn't copy the last byte.

    Also you may have to manually turn on DMA access on the HDD using hdparm, for speed.

    To restore you do a similar thing - boot knoppix.

    then mount the restore drive/fileserver (readonly if paranoid).

    Then:
    cat /mnt/test/20041010/machinename-hda-lzo-* | lzop -d > /dev/hda

    I'm not 100% sure of the command-line parameters. But that's the general principle. I have successfully backed up and restored a number of images this way.

    I use lzop because it is faster than gzip - with lzop I can get an average of 30MB/sec with an Athlon 2000XP - not far from max HDD transfer rate, for not much worse compression ratio. gzip is 2 to 3 times slower. Unfortunately lzop seems to be giving me an error in Knoppix 3.6 when I try to decompress. I'm mainly using Knoppix 3.3 though.

    Don't forget: CD-Rs can be flaky backup media. Assuming a 40GB HDD compresses to 15-20GB, you'll need about 25 CD-Rs. If any of these don't work you can't restore successfully. So you may need to double the number for redundancy. That is a lot of trouble.

    I actually suggest buying a few spare big HDDs and backup to them.

    Per GB they're not much more expensive than CD-Rs.

    100-200GB drives are about twice the price per GB compared to CD-Rs, and probably less flaky, problematic and troublesome for long term storage (plus take up less space than 150-300 CD-Rs). Just don't drop them and keep them in a safe dry + cool place (packed with dehumidifiers), e.g. data-grade fireproof safe. Buy multiple different brands of HDDs if you're paranoid.

    • Re:I use knoppix and dd (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You just posted a bunch of weird looking command lines that Windows XP users are supposed to use.

      My bet is most of them are quivering in the corner with a blanket calling for mommy after reading that.
      • "You just posted a bunch of weird looking command lines that Windows XP users are supposed to use. My bet is most of them are quivering in the corner with a blanket calling for mommy after reading that."

        Hehe. Point taken.

        BUT, my bet is most of them won't even notice my post flash past their screen ;). They don't see any dialog boxes etc etc.

        But for some reason same users are able to open messages containing worm infested encrypted zipfiles, enter the relevant passwords (included in message), and successf
  • It's a nice multi platform piece of software created by a company called SysV from Australia.
    It does backup based on md5 checksums, backing up only what has really changed.

    We even use it to do internet backup [procolix.com] (sorry, it's Dutch).
  • I noticed the Peter's Backup [sourceforge.net] project on SourceForge. It looks like it has most of the features requested. I haven't tried it yet, but I think I will.
  • If you have more than one computer on your local network, then why not have them backup to each other? It's much more convenient (and reliable) than messing with CD-Rs. On Linux this is pretty simple to do with 'cron' and 'rsync'. On Windows, there are some tools coming onto the market right now to do the same thing and I'm going to shamelessly plug my own. It's called Magic Mirror Backup [pensamos.com] and you can download it at http://www.pensamos.com/mmb/ [pensamos.com] . Version 1.0 is free, it works on Windows and Linux, and i
  • I've been using simplebackup [freshmeat.net] for a few months now. It's the best free (libre & gratis) solution I've found.

    It allows you to backup certain directories, ignore others, archive incrementally, differentially or completely in any one of a number of formats (zip, tar.gz, tar, rar of the top of my head). It also has volume spanning.

    Downside - you do have to edit a text config file (so it's not for you average windows user), but it's fairly trivial to set up a few batch files ("back up my pictures now!", "ba
  • This isn't an answer to your question exactly, it's just my approach to most of your problem.

    I use a secure disk program ( Bestcrypt [jetico.com], for Windows and Linux) to create mountable, secured virtual drives. I make each disk just under the limit for the burnable media, I bought a DVD burner, and given the limits of the DVD format the largest single file is 3.99 GB. I have two main virtual disks I use, one I mount every time I use the system (for desktop, email, favorites, etc.), the other is for things I use f

  • I wrote bash shell scripts to make full (Sunday) and differential (Monday through Saturday) backups of key parts of my filesystems. This is the basic structure of the script which runs every day as a cron job:

    #!/bin/bash

    DATE=`/bin/date +%Y%m%d`
    LAST_SUNDAY=`/bin/date -d "last sunday" +%Y%m%d`
    DIRECTORIES="/boot /etc /root /var /home"

    # perform a full or differential backup based on [Sunday|!Sunday]
    case `/bin/date +%A` in
    Sunday)
    # perform a full backup
    tar cfj /backup/$DATE-full.tar.bz2 $DIRECTORIES
    chmo

  • For Linux, though apparently not yet for Windows and MacOS X, there is the Eternal archival system. See http://www.parvat.com/index.php?PAGE=products/eter nal/home.php and http://linux-bangalore.org/2003/schedules/talkdeta ils.php?talkcode=C403.
  • I have both Windows and Linux desktops at home, and I never backup anything. The way I figure it, all the software on my Windows box came on CDs, so I already have backup copies of everything I paid for, and I don't have reams of data just lying around on my HD that I need to backup. If it weren't for the occasional crash, I'd probably never reinstall my PC, so my Athlon XP 2800+ would run like a 486/66. Linux changes so much and so often, you pretty much have to reinstall twice a year anyway, if you want
  • XXCOPY [xxcopy.com] Haven't personally used it to backup onto DVD or CDR's before, but have heard of it being done successfully/easily by others.

    Incredibly versatile tool. For my system backup I just use XXCOPY to clone my whole 'doze drive onto a spare HD loaded in a removable drive tray. When done, I have a complete, bootable backup sitting on the shelf for the next all-too-frequent catastrophe.

    Oh yah, and it's free.
  • Is the king of the hill...
    backup entire disk/partitions to bootable cd's or dvd's that are a breeze to restore.

  • External Harddrive (Score:2, Informative)

    by gtpilot ( 821547 )
    Honestly I can't stress how much I value my external harddrive. I have a laptop, and beyond addition storage, I use the HD for a good deal of backups.

    Sure it's more expensive than CD-Rs, but you get a ton more storage, and a heck of a lot faster (not to mention the added space if you want it), and you can get some great deals (I got an enclosure and 120GB for $90) on USB2 or firewire external drives from http://www.pricewatch.com/ [pricewatch.com] (just be sure you are buying the combo and not just an enclosure).

    With

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