Data Backup for Home Users
Jan 24, 2005
<rant>Why isn't there a decent piece of software that lets home users backup their hard drives every once in a while? Or if there's one, why can't I find it anywhere? I can't hire an IT department, so anything more than 3 or 4 clicks is not worth it.</rant>
So I finally gave up and wrote a homegrown tool - the bit about programs scratching a developer's personal itch is so true! It's trivial enough to not call it a piece of "software" or even a "utility". I had the following objectives in mind for my backup strategy:
- The backup should reside on DVDs. When my machine goes six feet under, I cannot fiddle with peripherals nobody else has. I want a disk I can carry in my jacket pocket, walk over to school, and have my files with me.
- Restoring should only involve copying the files back: no extracting from archives (Corollary to Murphy's Law: In any archive copied to optical media, exactly one bit gets toggled by an invisible evil force, thus rendering said archive unusable.)
- Incremental backups for intermediate days: copy only those files that changed since the last backup.
- I can't afford to pay for a program for such a simple task.
- Nice-to-have: have it automatically do this for me every X days.
Unfortunately, I found none that satisfied the given criteria. It didn't help that my primary platform is still Windows. I found Mike Rubel's article on Incremental Backups with rsync nice and informative, but useless on Windows because NTFS won't support hard links.
So I ended up writing this tool that looks at the last-modified date and copies over everything modified after a given date X to a temporary backup directory. Then, I just burn that to a DVD. Who said good solutions are complicated?
