Backup Software?
 

What are you using for system backup software? I'd like to find something that can do both my XP Pro (on hda, NTFS) and my Linux (on hdbX, ext3). So far, I have looked at Norton Ghost. It doesn't appear to be able to do ext3. Can anyone confirm that?

InstantRecovery from NovaStor will image disks on any Intel-based system with sufficient RAM. I believe the new version has some networking capability. It is a linux app that boots from CD and definitely does ext3 and NTFS.

They also have NovaBackup which is a Windows app that does backup/restore of selected files. The new version also has network capabilities and supposedly will do mapped drives.

Both programs do CD-RW, Jaz, Zip, etc. NovaBackup also writes to DVD-+RW. Since both your drives are in the same box, guess you would have to use the imager.

Hey, it looks like it will work for me. My only question is regarding space. Is there any way to estimate how many CD-R's I will need? I have a 20G and an 8G hard drive. The 20G has like 11.8G used, and the 8G has about 2G used. I'd like to know, so I don't have to run to Wal-Mart in the middle of a backup! :P

Mondo Rescue
 

It backs up via TAPE, NFS and CD. Check it out
www.microwerks.net/~hugo/

CD-R estimate
 

I was going to suggest using good old tar and gzip for the backup routines. Just mount the NTFS partition under linux and add the appropriate entry in cron to do your backup. Then burn the compressed tarballs out to CD. The problem comes in with restoring the backup to the NTFS filesystem though. As far as I know, support for writing NTFS is only experimental.

In any case, getting a CD-R estimate is simple and hard at the same time. What makes it hard is the compression ratio. What do you think would be the AVERAGE compression on all the files backed up? Once you decide that, it's simple math:

You have 11.8G + 2G used = 13.8G. Let's just say 14G
Let's assume a compression of 50% (pretty bad ratio in my opinion), giving 7G worth of data that has to be written.
CD-R on average store 650M. So, the number of CDs you'd need would be 14000M / 650M = 21.53 = 22 CDs

Again, the compression ratio is extremely important. Once you do this backup, you should have an idea of what ratio you can expect from the software to help future estimates.

Even though CD-Rs are cheap, using this to back up data regularly will cost a lot of money over time (not to mention a large pile of obsolete coasters).

Just buy a 30-pack or more. I was able to buy a 100-pack a while ago for about $50.

Yeah, I was thinking about the whole pile of CD's. So my other options would be to A) Buy a DVD-R/RW drive or B) Buy a tape drive. The tape drives are expensive, but can hold 70+ G of data. I have not priced DVD media lately, so I don't know how much that would cost...

Price of CD-Rs
 

Well, I am not sure where you get your discs. This is for US folks only, but this week Staples has 50 Japanese Sony's for $3.00 after rebate. Office Max has 30 Japanese Fuji's for $2.00. Check out the circulars in your paper each week and you can get some really excellent deals. I won't pay more than $.06 a CD. Now my backup strategy is quite different, considering I have nearly a TB of disc space on the home network. I have no problem rebuilding a machine, since I have extras to handle the load. I backup to a friend via a VPN to his network for critical files as well as to tape, NFS and occassionally CD As for everything else, most of this is music and video so CDs are a logical choice. You only have to backup the stuff you cannot recreate. You should backup everything to make you life a little easier, but not everything in life is easy.

CD-R prices
 

Man, I've got a friend who can sniff out CD-R deals like that. Actually, he can find stuff you can get for free after rebate (NICs and other fairly common devices). Maybe I ought to do more looking myself. 6 cents per CD is a really good price.

About the DVD-RW, if you want to go that route, take a look at Sony. They sell a DVD burner that conforms to BOTH the DVD-RW and DVD+RW formats. As for the media price, I can't be much help there. I have a feeling you can only buy them in jewel case sets, and I think (translation: guess) they average around $7 per disc (retail). That would reduce the number of discs for the backup tremendously, not to mention reducing the chance of a media error screwing up the data.

Rewritable DVD drives are expensive, and you might consider the CD-RW instead. Yeah, you'll still have a pile of CDs, but at least you can rewrite them. As needamiracle said, you won't have to do full backups every time either. I've read in a number of places that an effective strategy is to do one full backup each month, and an incremental backup once a week. Of course, that depends on how many users, how important the data is, etc. etc.

As for tape, I can't help you there. Never had any experience with them. I'd go with CD-RW or DVD-RW before a tape drive. You get more general use out of those drives than a tape drive.

Whoa! If you are going with NovaStor - read the fine print.

For one, the current version of NovaBackup (7.0) just does disks/CD/DVD's. Prior versions included both NovaDisk and NovaTape. The tape program is now a separate product.

For another, the disk imager (Instant Recovery 4.0) will write to CD-R and CD-RW but not currnently to any type of DVD. It does write to SCSI and EIDE tape and local and network hard drives. I have not tried the tape or drive options with this version.

The manuals are available as pdf files for both products. You would be well-served to read them and/or try demo versions before you buy - www.novastor.com

As to how many disks - that depends NB has a compression option and will estimate the size of the backup. IR can limit the image to used space for some OSes and will tell you how much space is used. I don't recall that it has a compression option - after all, you want an exact image. Otherwise, it does the whole disk, including free space.

RWild, you are right. I downloaded the evaluation version & burned it, just so I could poke around in it. :)