[geeks] W2K backup software?

[Adam Kropelin]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: geeks-admin at sunhelp.org 
> [mailto:geeks-admin at sunhelp.org] On Behalf Of Kris Kirby
> Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2002 3:14 AM
> To: Geeks
> Subject: [geeks] W2K backup software?
> 
> 
> I've got a friend who's machine Must Be Repartitioned because 
> the MB RAID
> controller is about to be used (it was supposed to be used in 
> the first
> place, but such confusion).
> 
> However, we need to do a full backup of the machine, which 
> has Win98 on a
> FAT32 fs, and W2K on NTFS. He has a Plextor 12x CDRW as well....

I just finished doing an impromptu survey of Windows backup software for
home use. My conclusion: It all sucks.

Seriously, I had four criteria, most of which were failed by every
package I tried, including muti-kilobuck backup suites:

(1) Had to support backups to disk files and optical media (as opposed
to only tape)
(2) Had to support software compression (goes hand-in-hand with #1)
(3) Had to allow me to back up network drives using only Windows
networking shares (i.e, without buying add-on "agents")
(4) Had to give me the sense that the programmers knew what they were
doing and that I can entrust my data to them. This is very subjective,
of course, but more than one candidate was thrown out immediately upon
first load due to  failure here.

One of the more promising packages I played with was, surprisingly
enough, Dantz Retrospect which was originally a Mac-only application.
The PC flavor seems to work pretty well and the lowest 2 levels offer
decent functionality at reasonable prices. The UI is a little different
than we might dream up in Windows land, but serviceable. My biggest
complaint is their mechanism for choosing what files to back up is very
clunky. Also, the app is very single-threaded in nature, so don't expect
to, say, prepare for a new backup while the current one is running.

But it is getting the job done for me now and I've done numerous backups
and restores with no failures at all. I should mention I've never tried
to back up an entire machine and restore from bare metal with
Retrospect. I only back up my data, not my applications and registry.

If anybody has other suggestions I'd love to hear them as I'm still
looking for the ultimate tool.

--Adam