Posted on 04/17/2006 9:22:06 AM PDT by holymoly
For several years, I had been using a tape drive & NovaStor software to backup files. The tape drive has died.
I'm looking for alternative methods to backup data; primarily a CD-R drive. (Never used/owned one.)
System specs:
Soyo SY-6VBA MB
1ghz Pentium 3
512mb RAM
Win98
20gb IDE HD (I forget the manufacturer)
I live in a rural area. Store choices within driving range are limited to OfficeMax, Best Buy and Circuit City (which I dislike).
The CD-R/burner software should produce CDs which can be read by any PC, even if the system is running MS-DOS.
Currently, I'm looking this Sony CD-R Drive at OfficeMax.
And now I have to get to work. I'll check back this afternoon.
Oh, I'm also considering a second/slave HD. However, I know nothing about "Ultra ATA". Are these things "backwards compatible"? Western Digital 80GB Internal Hard Drive
1ghz Pentium 3
512mb RAM
Win98
20gb IDE HD (I forget the manufacturer)
I'm not sure, but you may be able to find a hand-crank CD-R somewhere to keep with the motif. :-)
Yep. All you need to worry about is whether the ribbon cable will fit into the slot. There's at least a 99% probability it will work.
Skip the CD-R. Why not just get a DVD-RW? 4.7GB of backup there.
There's four possibilities who manufactured that drive. Maxtor, Seagate, IBM or Western Digital.
I have both an external DVD-RW and an external 80GB drive.
Highly recommended:
1. Acronis True Image 9.1
2. Maxtor One Touch III external HD (forget the software that comes with it - it sucks.
3. Plextor CD/DVD burner
While I re-sell these products, they can be had cheaply from NewEgg.com. Check it out.
Skip the CD thing and get an external hard drive. Backups aren't much good unless you do them, and you will quickly tire of backing up to CD.
Get a DVD Burner. I just bought a nice 16x one for around $ 60 at Officemax (Lite On 1635s) last week and installed it in about 10 minutes. Blank DVDs are cheap now, and a DVD burner can burn both DVD-Rs, DVD+Rs, DVDRW, and CD-Rs.
Pretty sure your PC specs will be ok for the DVD burner - check the side panel of the box to be sure!
CD-R drives are dirt cheap under $20), especially from mail order sources like geeks.com. If your data volume is small, CD-R will give you the most portability but if your backup files exceed 700mb, then DVR has come down enough in price to be a consideration. How does that $15 - $20 range compare with what Office Max is quoting you?
Windows XP comes with an excellent backup program that will restore from bare bones. It doesn't install by default on XP Home Edition, but it's on the disk and free.
I've had to do a system recovery restore in an emergency situation and it worked like a charm.
The 900 dollar server backup program from Veritas was a total loss. Completely unusuable when actually needed to restore a server.
CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are basically the same price these days. DVD-Rs can burn at least 4.7 GB/disc (assuming you don't get a dual-layer burner) and still have CD burning ability if you need it. There are two highly-recommended ones by the excellent AnandTech.com website:
NEC 16X ND-3550A--$36 shipped
Pioneer 16X DVR-110D--$43 shipped
I used to use an external USB drive to take full and incremental backups of my C:\drive using Dantz (EMC) Retrospect. It was good but it was clunky and took too much time to run a full backup even with USB 2.0.
This new system I use takes less time and negates the need for having to reinstall Windows as a first step to Disaster Recovery. I still do a once-per-month external backup as I used to but for day to day DR purposes I takes snaps each evening.
Give it some though. Tape is dead and CDs are too small. Even DVDs are too small if you have lots of data to backup like I do.
ANOTHER COMPUTER QUESTION:
I have started but stopped downloading:
MICROSOFT ONE CARE
--ANTISPYWARE, ANTIVIRUS, AUTODOWNLOAD ETC ETC ETC.
But it insists on Norton and Zone Alarm being uninstalled--perhaps other such.
Have uninstalled Norton SystemWorks but am hesitant to end up with just Microslop guarding things. Very hesitant.
On the other hand, I like the notion of the characters who wrote the operating system getting their act together a bit more and more automatically getting/keeping things more shipshape.
What are the experts' hereon's opinions of all such?
Please and thank you.
Agree on most points. Veritas is an expensive waste of time.
One of the things that makes Acronis True Image worthwhile is its ability to mount an image as a drive. Has a decent scheduling engine, too. It's also handy tobe able to boot from an Acronis-built CD and pull an image across a network. This program has been a real life-saver.
The old NTbackup program that ships with XP isn't bad, but it's not as effective a bare metal restoration tool, IMHO.
NTbackup has the advantage that it works, it's free, It only requires the original Windows CD.
Other than that I would assume that other programs might have advantages. The reason Veritas failed is that the CD it made wouldn't boot on the server, and the backup tape couldn't be used any other way.
This is very odd, because the CD would boot on workstation PCs.
The company survived because it had an alternate backup of the SQL database, and because email and documents were synchronized on the workstations. But the Veritas backup was trash.
Now, all backups go to an external hard drive, one of several that are rotated off site.
Agreed a DVD-RW is definitely the way to go. I bought one a few weeks ago and was dreading installing it on my computer. I expected it to be a real pain to set up, but the whole thing took me 15 minutes and I burned my first DVD last night. DVD-RW rock.
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