File backup software recommendations?

TMetzinger

TMetzinger

Final Approach
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Tim
I'm looking for some backup software for my XP system with a feature set I haven't been able to find in any SOHO products so far. Here's what I do and what I need...

When I built my PC, I used Acronis TrueImage to take disk level backups of all my partitions and wrote those off to a portable hard disk. I take snapshots of these partitions once a quarter or if I make any major system changes, and they serve as my "disaster recovery" images in case a disk dies or the system becomes unstable.

I've been using the regular backup utility in XP along with the command scheduler to do file level backups of the system partitions and system state to a backup disk, with a full backup monthly and a differential backup every weekday. I rotate these files so I always have at least the last 30 days of backups on hand, and they serve as my "I deleted something I shouldn't have" or "I misconfigured something" protection.

The problem I have is that by the end of the month the differential job is backing up a whole lot of stuff every day, and I've considered switching to an incremental job instead, which would minimize backup sizes but make for a more cumbersome restoration process.

What I WANT is something that does what NetBackup does, and lets me write incremental backups every day, but keeps a catalog database and lets me either:
  • Restore the system or a specific volume to a specific date (and it will use the full and all the necessary incrementals in one job)
  • Search for a specific file name, and have it show me all the backed up versions of that file, and let me restore the one I want (by having a catalog of all the backups performed and searching across them)
If anybody knows of an application that will do this in the sub-$100.00 range, please pass it on.
 
I really don't want to set up a central server, the whole point is to keep the speed of local disk-based backup, on an XP platform. I've used Amanda (and like it a lot), but it's more than I want to do here.

What's really missing from all the basic products is a database that would let me search for a file name and have it tell me what backup set(s) it's located in, so I don't have to manually browse through 90-odd directory trees.

This griping, however, gave me an idea. If I can use the regular NT backup utility, write a different set every day, and log the backups so that I have a directory text file for each day, then I can just use the XP search function to find the file name in the mass of text files - and the files that give me a hit are restore targets. I just need to dust off my XP batch programming skills so I can automatically name the backup files sequentially by the day, and be sure I can write a corresponding detailed log file.

Thanks for the inspiration!
 
Well, I've successfully created batch files to make my various backups, datestamp them, and dump all the logs with matching datestamps into a common directory, so I can run a search on them. Not as nice as NetBackup, but a whole lot cheaper!


OOOH just had the good idea to bundle the old logs with the old backup files when I do the monthly rotation! Why is it that good ideas always occur way past bedtime?
 
Ah, good old BAT files. Everything old is new again.

Rich
 
Sounds like a lot of work, Tim. That said, I admire your dedication to data integrity.

How much data are we talking? Why don't you just use something like Carbonite and not worry about it again?

Crashplan might do what you want it to do. It is designed to do site-to-site, but I think they allow incremental local backups with unlimited versioning.

Another cool, free, tool that I've run across for those running Linux...

http://www.rsnapshot.org/ (for Linux)
 
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