In Wind0ze I used Sonic Backup My PC to backup my computer and my shares. Is there anything out there that will automatically back up selected data to DVD on a schedule (that isn't some outrageous amount of steps, scripts, text files and bullcrap). I have found a couple of "solutions" which required writing complicated scripts and creating .ISO's and then writing to the DVD writer, that's ridiculous stuff, I am looking for something simple.

Not exactly sure what you have in mind, or what might be too "rediculous", but how do you plan on having these backups be automated? Do you have some sort of DVD burning station that auto rotates discs? Or is this less automated than has been alluded to? If it's more along the lines of you just want an easy-to-use DVD burning solution, K3B is excellent. If it's truly an automated backup solution, a bit more info on how the discs are rotated and if sequential backup is necessary and things of that nature is necessary. Tell us your needs so we can offer solutions to your situation Believe it or not, a lot of folks have never used Windows (or haven't in quite some time), and much less, applications specific to that OS.

Cool

Here is what I want to do.

I have a DVD+-RW in my system.
I want to select a bunch of files and directories to be backed up. Each night at say, 1am, I want the application to automatically start and write those files and folders to the DVD that is in the drive.

If that's it (not sure why you can't start that yourself, but let's go ahead and leave that alone for now) then you could easily program a cron job to do that. Although, I assume that involving cron and a few other command line arguments is what you are referring to as bullcrap. But the benefit of doing it that way is that you only have to do it once. The "script" and other bullcrap wouldn't be hard for most advanced Linux users to build, and placing in something called a cron job (cron is the system scheduler for linux, a cron job is when you have cron schedule something for you) into your crontab, or even a system directory (possibly /etc/cron.daily exists on your system?) would be all it takes.

Using a GUI to automated tasks is... archaic. As funny as that sounds, the command line is built for things that are exactly what you want. Why on earth do you need a GUI to automatically execute something that requires no user interaction (other than placing a new DVD in the drive)? You can have the output sent to file, that if you prefer, you can open in a Graphical Text editor.

So, is there any particular reason you don't want a 'script and other bullcrap' or is just that it's a little complicated to understand. If that's the only problem, certainly people on this site can walk you through getting it setup, and possibly even providing you with a working script.

Cool

I agree with MasterC (no rhyme intended this time)...

Why don't you create some symbolic links of what you want backed up each night to a folder, then create an ISO of that data, then burn that ISO to a DVD?

Here is a link to get you started on how to do all of this from the command-line (err, it shows how to create CD ISO's, but a couple of commands differently will generate the DVD ISO's you need).

If you ask, perhaps some nice poster will write up the script that cron can run for you...

Deion "Mule" Christopher