Back me up
Posted on October 22, 2006
One Comment
[Introducing our first post from Peter!]
Now that I’ve acquired a fancy digital camera that emits JPEGs averaging 3-6MBs, my personal storage situation is getting a bit out of hand. I’ve given up the idea of backing up music files and honed in on finding a reliable solution to backing up my ~18GB digital photo archive.
The review process started with a survey of commercial offerings targeted at the consumer market. I was willing to pay less than $100 for a quick hit, if I could find a decent piece of software. Before we go much further, here is list of features I was looking for:
Must have
- DVD as a backup medium
- Span multiple discs
Nice to have
- Non-proprietary backup format
- Raw uncompressed (for fast(er) restoration)
- Scheduling capability
- Open source / Free
- Simple user interface
After a few weeks of casually downloading trials of commercial products, I was convinced nothing was going to work exactly as needed. The backup software market seems to be saturated with software that is ineffective, clumsy, and unusable. In most cases, vendors are not offering multiple disc spanning, or at least are not marketing this feature. I can’t be the only person looking for this functionality, or do most people have tape drives?
Frantic at this point due to the aging hard drive in my file server, I begin Google’ing around for Linux-based utilities that could be run directly on the file server. From a link in an obscure newsgroup posting, I find multicd
This wonderful little utility inspects a target directory and produces 1 or more ext2 image files that are ready for burning to CD/DVD. Perfect, exactly what I was looking for. After running multicd against my digital photo archive, I had several images ready to be pressed to DVD.
Doh, cdrecord wasn’t able to burn the images to DVD! No worries, the ProDVD extension did the trick. Pay attention to the readme file as there is an environment variable that must be configured for the full DVD burning feature set to work.
Once the images are laid onto the DVDs, they are easily browsed by mounting in Linux or using R-Linux in Windows. R-Linux has a handy file browser and lets you restore data off the image one file at a time or in a larger batch.
The resulting solution is somewhat cobbled together, but works like a charm. It is also able to be schedule via cron to generate image files for later burning to disc. I feel much better now that my digital photo archive is being backed up and I diligently deliver sets of DVDs to a safe deposit box on a quarterly basis.
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I ran into the same problem when I purchased a 8.1 megapixel cannon and started snapping pictures off like a crack addict. Having a decent way to store stuff was always a problem as I tend to have files scattered all across my hard-drive.
So I finally broke down and went to my local ‘Staples’ and bought a Maxtor external hard-drive. Very nice! 320 gigabytes and it was roughly around $119. You can purchase smaller ones at Walmart, etc. I think 40gig will run you around $60 and a 60-100gig will put you right around $100. Now the 320 gig storage bay I have is kinda big and bulky. About 9 inches long and 4 inches tall, and about 1.5 inches wide. But it fits nicely in my computer bag and I take it everywhere. (it really should probably stay on my desk.) But the smaller 40 and 60 gig varieties are very compact and easier to port around with ya.
I hope this helps.