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I use PowerQuest's Disk Image (same function as Ghost) for backing up
entire system drive every once in a while (once a month or so). Then I
use a program called "Second Copy 2000" by Centered Systems
(www.centered.com, not affiliated in any way, just a very happy
customer) for incremental nightly backups of all the work I do and
data I use.
Disk Image gives me the opportunity to restore system disk at any time
when something big and screwy happens (SystemReport stops functioning, the
latest upgrade of something destroys previous working version of that
something, a free trial needs to be "rewinded", something messes up
the registry, etc.).
Second Copy is a very small and efficient backup program that runs
constantly on the background and makes regular nightly backups over
the network of everything I have set it up to back up. It's *very*
flexible in terms of letting you specify *exactly* how you want the
stuff backed up. I find it easier to have it back up various folders
into different and relatively small *.zip files instead of writing one
huge file; it is easier to search the smaller files. Also, when
writing the *.zip files to CD-s it's easier to manage a number of
smaller files than cut one large file into pieces. The drawback of
cutting one large file into small pieces is that in order to restore
anything from that huge file you first need to stitch it together. But
when you want to restore something samll you did a month ago and
messed up today, then it's much easier to restore that file from a
small *.zip file than to start copying your backup CD-s to the HD,
stitch them together, and then restore your small file.
Another thing to do is to catalog your CD-s where you have written
your backup files. I use "Advanced Disk Catalog" by ElcomSoft
(http://www.elcomsoft.com/adc.html, again not affiliated but just a
happy customer) that can read and catalog what is inside the *.zip
files in addition to cataloging everything else. So once I have
written my backup *.zip files to a CD, I catalog the CD, write
corresponding ID number on the CD and store it. 6 months later when I
desperately need to restore an old version of something I have done in
the past I first search the catalog for the file, go and get the CD,
and restore it from there.
So I guess what I want to say with all this is that often a few small
programs may work better hand-in-hand than one big program that has
been designed to do it all. I tested out *many* backup utilities
before deciding to get SecondCopy, many of them 10 times bigger and
10 times as "feature rich".
Hope this helps,
Ivo Karindi
ivo@xxxxxxxxx
ghc> I use Ghost to make a giant image backup of my hardrive. I am
ghc> looking for a backup program that
ghc> 1. complement my Ghost backup image
ghc> 2. do unlimited size backups. (changing files are larger than
ghc> 4 GB.)
ghc> 3. can do a search by DATE of files to backup
ghc> 4. could replace Ghost if I wanted to.
ghc> 5. span CD-ROM's and use CD-r as opposed to CD-rw
ghc> Any ideas?
ghc> Sent by ePrompter, the premier email notification software.
ghc> Free download at http://www.ePrompter.com.
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