backup : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

• Free software.
• You can select just the files to backup, perhaps only those recently changed.
• You can restore your files to any other machine. No special hardware is needed.

• It would take a stack of floppies as high as the empire state building to backup an entire hard disk.

• You can select just the files to backup, perhaps only those recently changed.
• You can easily restore just the files you want, or even use them directly on the zip without restoring.

• The media are expensive.
• You need a special zip drive.
• The disks only hold 100 MB.

• Runs nicely unattended, so long as your backup fits on only one tape.
• Easy to carry media offsite.

• Tapes must be restored using the exact same brand and model of tape drive — which may be hard to find if your computer was burned or stolen.
• Tapes only hold typically 500 MB per tape.
• The media wear out quickly.
• Very slow. You have to let them run overnight.

• Runs nicely unattended, so long as your backup fits on only one tape.
• Easy to carry media offsite.

• Tapes must be restored using the exact same brand and model of tape drive — which may be hard to find if your computer was burned or stolen.
• Only hold perhaps 2 gig.
• Media are very delicate. The HP drives eat tapes for breakfast and breaks down frequently. Mine spent most of its first year in the repair shop. It died after the warranty wore out. It never worked reliably even after being freshly repaired.
• About $1200.00 CAD .
• Slow, especially to restore since it has to search the tape from end to end to find each file.

• Very fast backup.
• Can use files directly off the backup without restoring.
• Cheap. You can get huge disks for a few hundred dollars.

• It puts all your eggs in one basket. If a virus attacks one disk, it will attack the other, same for thievery, a fire or a faulty power supply. You have only one backup. If anything goes wrong with it, you have nothing else. With other forms of backup, you keep at least three generations, some offsite.

• Same benefits as disk.
• Can take disk out and take it offsite.

• When you add up the cost of three extra disks, to keep several generations of backup, this option gets expensive.
• The caddy is a kludge. Eventually it will break or damage the disk drives. Hard drives are delicate. They are not meant to be carted around. You may also accidentally take the drive out with the power on and fry it.

• Holds 600 MB per disk, a fair size, but still not big enough to backup an entire drive on one CD. There is no mechanism to spill automatically to a second CD.
• You can restore to any machine that has a CD-ROM drive.
• You keep all your backups, scores of them since the media are not reusable. This protects you if you corrupt your files, and don’t notice until much later. If you didn’t have the old backups to go to, all you would have are backups containing corrupt copies of the file.
• You can choose which files to backup.
• Blanks are about $0.40 CAD each plus a $0.21 CAD per disc CPCC media levy as a piracy tax. Last revised/verified: 2008-03-02
• The media are very robust. Magnetic fields won’t damage them. Dropping them on the floor is unlikely to damage them.

• You cannot backup and restore the Windows registry, just datafiles. Decent operating systems don’t have that disgusting registry. Its sole purpose is to lock programs into running only on Windows. Because of that deliberate designed-in Microsoft limitation (a problem with nearly all backup methods), you cannot restore applications. You must reinstall them all from scratch.
• The Roxio (née Adaptec) Easy CD creator program can’t remember which directories you like to back up. It insists you tell it afresh each time — which can take an additional 10 minutes per backup, and the process is quite error prone. CD Creator remembers which individual files you backed up last time, but not which directories. If you tell it to back up the same files, the problem is it won’t back up any new files or directories.
• The Roxio (née Adaptec) Easy CD creator program requires about 16 MB of free disk space while it is copying. to buffer the transfers to the cdw. If you try to use your computer for something else during backup, the program may not be able to keep up with the fixed speed cdr, and the whole CD will be ruined.

• like CD ROM burner, but lets you back up and restore everything, even the registry.

• When you back up, you need to backup an entire partition. You can’t select individual files. This means you waste time and CDs backing up your *.exe and *.dll files every day, even though they have not changed.
• Ghost runs under DOS, so there is strong possibility it won’t support your disk drive or CD-ROM burner. It can’t use Windows, NT or Linux drivers. It needs DOS drivers. You need to find and install DOS disk drivers for your SCSI controllers, SCSI disks, CD ROM burner and Ethernet card. DOS can’t see drives that don’t have any FAT partitions on them, though Ghost sometimes can. This is not something the novice can tackle. If DOS/Ghost won’t support your CD-ROM burner, you need about a gigabyte of free disk space in an unused NTFS partition, both to hold the a compressed image of the partition and the CD-ROM image. You then later boot back to NT and back that image file up. It can be quite a challenge getting Plug & Play in BIOS to work for DOS, and to collect the latest versions of all the ancient old DOS drivers. Before you buy Ghost, make sure you can access your disks, CD ROM burner (as a reader), and your LAN when you boot to DOS from a floppy. If you can’t do that, Ghost won’t work on your machine.
• The backup will take dozens of CDs, and at about $0.61 CAD each (including levy), so you won’t be doing that frequently. Each partition needs to start a fresh CD.
• Unfortunately when you restore, you restore everything even your data files back the way they were at the time of the backup. You can’t restore just a single file. Ideally you combine this method with Easy CD Creator to backup just data files later. Then your restore an entire partition with Ghost, then restore your more recent data files on top of that.
• To use it you must insert a master CD and a special floppy, then reboot, then insert a series of blank CDs, then reboot back to NT. It is not something you can do unattended.
• The user interface is something only a Unix guru could love, with a zillion obscure command line switches. It is quite intimidating, quite unlike the other Norton utilities. It refers to the drives and partitions by physical number not the more human-friendly drive letter, OS, or volume label. You can’t easily specify more than one drive at once to back up.
• To backup or restore, you have to reboot to DOS to run Ghost. Windows won’t let you fiddle with the registry while it is running.
• Ghost optionally compresses the backup files.
• Ghost backs up FAT (Windows), NTFS (NT) and EXT-2 (Linux) partitions.
• Norton support people won’t talk to you unless you pay them.

• like CD ROM burner with Ghost, but does not require huge amounts of free disk space. It gets about 1 gig of files per CD, and it automatically splits partitions over CDs.

• Very tedious since it produces 5 floppies for disaster recover as well. The backup program is badly written making you reinsert the floppies in random orders, and sometimes asks for a disk it already has. Further it excruciatingly slowly writes many tiny files individually instead of building a disk image of the floppies and copying them in one fell swoop to physical floppy.
• Beware! This scheme has an almost fatal flaw. You must restore to a disk partitioned identically to the original. It is up to you to manually record the FDISK partition information and to restore it. You may not be able to do that unless you restore to an identical drive to the original.

• like CD ROM burner holds 8 times more. Holds 4,700 MB per disk, a fair size, but still not big enough to backup an entire drive on one DVD. There is no mechanism to spill automatically to a second DVD.
• You can restore to any machine that has a DVD drive.
• You keep all your backups, scores of them since the media are not reusable. This protects you if you corrupt your files, and don’t notice until much later. If you didn’t have the old backups to go to, all you would have are backups containing corrupt copies of the file.
• You can choose which files to backup. You can zip them first for compaction.
• Blank DVDs are about $0.40 CAD each without any CPCC media levy as a piracy tax. Last revised/verified: 2008-03-02
• The media are very robust. Magnetic fields won’t damage them. Dropping them on the floor is unlikely to damage them.

• You cannot backup and restore the Windows registry, just datafiles. Decent operating systems don’t have that disgusting registry. Its sole purpose is to lock programs into running only on Windows. Because of that deliberate designed-in Microsoft limitation (a problem with nearly all backup methods), you cannot restore applications. You must reinstall them all from scratch.
• If you don’t remember to click eject when the disk is finshed, the directory won’t get written to it, and you will have an effectively empty disk.

1. The put an auxiliary stripped down copy of XP on a hidden partition.
2. They put a compressed copy of the disk image of what a machine looks like fresh from the factor in this hidden partition.
3. They don’t try to write the CDs from DOS or other miniature OS.

If your disk it totally trashed and you have no backups, you can still restore your system to factory conditions by booting the alternate partition and restoring from the compressed factory disk images.

The other downside of this approach is it needs enormous amounts of free disk space to work. You need room for copies of every sector on your hard disk that contains data, and the DVD images containing the data with the embedded Reed-Solomon error correcting codes. So in theory you need perhaps twice as much free space as you have filled! And usually Acer image backup seems to demand even more free space than that. It seems overly partial to only using contiguous space on drive D:.

• holds 4.7 gig (4700 MB), eight times the capacity of a CD.
• Blank DVDs are about $0.40 CAD each without any CPCC media levy as a piracy tax, Last revised/verified: 2008-03-02 which is quite cheap for the capacity compared with other media.

• If you want to back up just a little, you still use an entire disc.
• You need to buy three different NTI programs:
  1. NTI Backup Now! to do a file by file backup and restore.
     $60.00 USD
  2. NTI CD & DVD Maker Platinum/Titanium to copy DVDs, burn music to DVD.
     $40.00 USD
  3. NTI Drive Backup! to do an image backup.
     $40.00 USD
  You can save a little money buying them as a bundle. Acer bundles Backup Now! and CD & DVD Maker Gold (no MP3 support) with their computers.

• Internet connection is orders of magnitude slower than a CD or DVD writer.
• You have to trust Symantec to protect your data from snoops after it arrives on their site, and trust them to transport it securely over the net.
• You need a working OS with Norton installed to restore. It is for protecting individual files not the system as a whole.
• There is a 2 GB limit on how much you can back up.
• This is an auxiliary backup to your primary DVD image and file-by-file backups.

• Internet connection is orders of magnitude slower than a CD or DVD writer.
• You have to trust Carbonite to protect your data from snoops after it arrives on their site, and trust them to transport it securely over the net.
• You need a working OS with Carbonite installed to restore. It is for protecting individual files not the system as a whole.
• This is an auxiliary backup to your primary DVD image and file-by-file backups.

• A 32 MB flash drive holds as much as 7 DVDs.
• A flash drive is reusable.
• A flash drive is orders of magnitude faster than a DVD or tape.
• You can clip it to your keychain and have all your files with you instantly to restore wherever you go. It is unlikely both your computer and your keys will be stolen at the same time.
• This sort of backup does not require any sort of software, other than perhaps WinZip or other archiver, so you know you can restore even if you lose the backup software.
• If you empty a flash drive, you can use it for disk caching