Using Zip for backup/archive

On 26 Wrz, 00:36, Milt wrote:
Caesar,

From some of your comments, I'm not sure that you understand the difference
between "copying" your C: drive and making an "image" of it. A copy will not
restore the drive if it fails. An image will.

Also, it's not a good practice to keep either a copy or an image on the
drive you're trying to protect the contents of. If the drive fails, you may
not be able to recover the contents of the backup! Also, each time you make
another backup, you will be copying the previous backup too. The size of data
will grow rapidly. And if the computer is damaged, you'll loose your backup.

At the very least, make your backup to another partition on the drive. What
I do is make a new full backup image each month, along with daily incremental
backups. And each month, when I make the full backup image, I copy it to a
thumb drive, which I then store out in my garage. That way even if there's a
fire or theft of the computer I still can do a full restoration to a new hard
drive.

I used to make my copy to a "spanned" set of CD's. But that was tedious. Now
I backup to a thumb drive. I've been buying 16 Gig. thumb drives for $30.
Also, you can use an external hard drive. That's even better.

There are several free utilities for making images. I haven't used any of
them, so I can't comment. But with Ghost and True Image, you can set the
program to make the backups automatically. I let Ghost make them at 3 AM each
day.

Also, the Ghost disk has a simple form of Windows on it. So if I can not
boot from Windows, I can still boot from the Ghost disk and do a system
restore. I think True Image is similar. And I know that True Image has a
"sandbox" so you can try out programs without installing them directly.

Read up on the two mentioned programs on their web sites. You'll then know
better what you need.

Milt

If I were you, I'd



"Caesar Romano" wrote:
On Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:13:01 -0700, Milt
wrote Re Using Zip for
backup/archive:

Caesar,

You may want to look at Symantec's Norton Ghost or Acrontis True Image. I'm
sure that many other dedicated backup programs are good too.

I use Norton Ghost. It allows me to automatically make a monthly backup and
daily incremental backups starting the first of each month. It also can split
those files into 700 Mb. or 4 Gig. files so that I can copy them to CD or
Thumb Drive that's formated for FAT 32.

Others probably do those things too. I'm just not familiar with them.

Milt

Thanks for the suggestions Milt. I should have mentioned two other
constraints. The solution needs to be freeware, and needs to backup to
the same drive (c:, the only drive available).
--
I filter all messages from google groups.

On 25 Wrz, 23:34, Caesar Romano wrote:
On Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:13:01 -0700, Milt
wrote Re Using Zip for
backup/archive:

Caesar,

You may want to look at Symantec's Norton Ghost or Acrontis True Image. I'm
sure that many other dedicated backup programs are good too.

I use Norton Ghost. It allows me to automatically make a monthly backup and
daily incremental backups starting the first of each month. It also can split
those files into 700 Mb. or 4 Gig. files so that I can copy them to CD or
Thumb Drive that's formated for FAT 32.

Others probably do those things too. I'm just not familiar with them.

Milt

Thanks for the suggestions Milt. I should have mentioned two other
constraints. The solution needs to be freeware, and needs to backup to
the same drive (c:, the only drive available).
--
I filter all messages from google groups.

On 25 Wrz, 23:34, Caesar Romano wrote:
On Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:13:01 -0700, Milt
wrote Re Using Zip for
backup/archive:

Caesar,

You may want to look at Symantec's Norton Ghost or Acrontis True Image. I'm
sure that many other dedicated backup programs are good too.

I use Norton Ghost. It allows me to automatically make a monthly backup and
daily incremental backups starting the first of each month. It also can split
those files into 700 Mb. or 4 Gig. files so that I can copy them to CD or
Thumb Drive that's formated for FAT 32.

Others probably do those things too. I'm just not familiar with them.

Milt

Thanks for the suggestions Milt. I should have mentioned two other
constraints. The solution needs to be freeware, and needs to backup to
the same drive (c:, the only drive available).
--
I filter all messages from google groups.

On 27 Wrz, 13:56, "http://books.google.com/books?
id=ifqnAAAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:%22Russ+Manning
%22&lr=&as_brr=0&rview=1&source=gbs_book_other_ver sions_r&cad=2"
wrote:
On 25 Wrz, 23:34, Caesar Romano wrote:



On Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:13:01 -0700, Milt
wrote Re Using Zip for
backup/archive:

Caesar,

You may want to look at Symantec's Norton Ghost or Acrontis True Image. I'm
sure that many other dedicated backup programs are good too.

I use Norton Ghost. It allows me to automatically make a monthly backup and
daily incremental backups starting the first of each month. It also can split
those files into 700 Mb. or 4 Gig. files so that I can copy them to CD or
Thumb Drive that's formated for FAT 32.

Others probably do those things too. I'm just not familiar with them.

Milt

Thanks for the suggestions Milt. I should have mentioned two other
constraints. The solution needs to be freeware, and needs to backup to
the same drive (c:, the only drive available).
--
I filter all messages from google groups.

On 27 Wrz, 13:56, "http://books.google.com/books?
id=ifqnAAAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:%22Russ+Manning
%22&lr=&as_brr=0&rview=1&source=gbs_book_other_ver sions_r&cad=2"
wrote:
On 25 Wrz, 23:34, Caesar Romano wrote:



On Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:13:01 -0700, Milt
wrote Re Using Zip for
backup/archive:

Caesar,

You may want to look at Symantec's Norton Ghost or Acrontis True Image. I'm
sure that many other dedicated backup programs are good too.

I use Norton Ghost. It allows me to automatically make a monthly backup and
daily incremental backups starting the first of each month. It also can split
those files into 700 Mb. or 4 Gig. files so that I can copy them to CD or
Thumb Drive that's formated for FAT 32.

Others probably do those things too. I'm just not familiar with them.

Milt

Thanks for the suggestions Milt. I should have mentioned two other
constraints. The solution needs to be freeware, and needs to backup to
the same drive (c:, the only drive available).
--
I filter all messages from google groups.

On 27 Wrz, 13:56, "http://books.google.com/books?
id=ifqnAAAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:%22Russ+Manning
%22&lr=&as_brr=0&rview=1&source=gbs_book_other_ver sions_r&cad=2"
wrote:
On 25 Wrz, 19:54, Caesar Romano wrote:



Hello,

I need to develope a backup/archive solution that can be run from a
command console (cmd.exe). *I was thinking of using the Info-Zip zip
program *http://www.info-zip.org/*as follows:

zip -r -q -S * Backup.zip *c:\*.*

where

*-r *= recurse into directories
-q = quiet operation
-S = include system and hidden files
c: = the WinXP system drive

The purpose of Backup.zip would be to keep an archive that can use to
restore the c: drive by booting from BartPE and unziping Backup.zip
back to c:

Does this have a chance of working for a restore? Is there something
out there better than Info-Zip for this?

Thanks for any comments.
--
I filter all messages from google groups.

On 27 Wrz, 13:56, "http://books.google.com/books?
id=ifqnAAAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:%22Russ+Manning
%22&lr=&as_brr=0&rview=1&source=gbs_book_other_ver sions_r&cad=2"
wrote:
On 25 Wrz, 19:54, Caesar Romano wrote:



Hello,

I need to develope a backup/archive solution that can be run from a
command console (cmd.exe). *I was thinking of using the Info-Zip zip
program *http://www.info-zip.org/*as follows:

zip -r -q -S * Backup.zip *c:\*.*

where

*-r *= recurse into directories
-q = quiet operation
-S = include system and hidden files
c: = the WinXP system drive

The purpose of Backup.zip would be to keep an archive that can use to
restore the c: drive by booting from BartPE and unziping Backup.zip
back to c:

Does this have a chance of working for a restore? Is there something
out there better than Info-Zip for this?

Thanks for any comments.
--
I filter all messages from google groups.

On 27 Wrz, 13:56, "http://books.google.com/books?
id=ifqnAAAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:%22Russ+Manning
%22&lr=&as_brr=0&rview=1&source=gbs_book_other_ver sions_r&cad=2"
wrote:
On 25 Wrz, 22:13, Milt wrote:



Caesar,

You may want to look at Symantec's Norton Ghost or Acrontis True Image. I'm
sure that many other dedicated backup programs are good too.

I use Norton Ghost. It allows me to automatically make a monthly backup and
daily incremental backups starting the first of each month. It also can split
those files into 700 Mb. or 4 Gig. files so that I can copy them to CD or
Thumb Drive that's formated for FAT 32.

Others probably do those things too. I'm just not familiar with them.

Milt

Caesar Romano" wrote:
Hello,

I need to develope a backup/archive solution that can be run from a
command console (cmd.exe). *I was thinking of using the Info-Zip zip
program *http://www.info-zip.org/*as follows:

zip -r -q -S * Backup.zip *c:\*.*

where

*-r *= recurse into directories
-q = quiet operation
-S = include system and hidden files
c: = the WinXP system drive

The purpose of Backup.zip would be to keep an archive that can use to
restore the c: drive by booting from BartPE and unziping Backup.zip
back to c:

Does this have a chance of working for a restore? Is there something
out there better than Info-Zip for this?

Thanks for any comments.
--
I filter all messages from google groups.

On 27 Wrz, 13:56, "http://books.google.com/books?
id=ifqnAAAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:%22Russ+Manning
%22&lr=&as_brr=0&rview=1&source=gbs_book_other_ver sions_r&cad=2"
wrote:
On 25 Wrz, 22:13, Milt wrote:



Caesar,

You may want to look at Symantec's Norton Ghost or Acrontis True Image. I'm
sure that many other dedicated backup programs are good too.

I use Norton Ghost. It allows me to automatically make a monthly backup and
daily incremental backups starting the first of each month. It also can split
those files into 700 Mb. or 4 Gig. files so that I can copy them to CD or
Thumb Drive that's formated for FAT 32.

Others probably do those things too. I'm just not familiar with them.

Milt

Caesar Romano" wrote:
Hello,

I need to develope a backup/archive solution that can be run from a
command console (cmd.exe). *I was thinking of using the Info-Zip zip
program *http://www.info-zip.org/*as follows:

zip -r -q -S * Backup.zip *c:\*.*

where

*-r *= recurse into directories
-q = quiet operation
-S = include system and hidden files
c: = the WinXP system drive

The purpose of Backup.zip would be to keep an archive that can use to
restore the c: drive by booting from BartPE and unziping Backup.zip
back to c:

Does this have a chance of working for a restore? Is there something
out there better than Info-Zip for this?

Thanks for any comments.
--
I filter all messages from google groups.

On 27 Wrz, 13:56, "http://books.google.com/books?
id=ifqnAAAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:%22Russ+Manning
%22&lr=&as_brr=0&rview=1&source=gbs_book_other_ver sions_r&cad=2"
wrote:
On 26 Wrz, 00:36, Milt wrote:



Caesar,

From some of your comments, I'm not sure that you understand the difference
between "copying" your C: drive and making an "image" of it. A copy will not
restore the drive if it fails. An image will.

Also, it's not a good practice to keep either a copy or an image on the
drive you're trying to protect the contents of. If the drive fails, you may
not be able to recover the contents of the backup! Also, each time you make
another backup, you will be copying the previous backup too. The size of data
will grow rapidly. And if the computer is damaged, you'll loose your backup.

At the very least, make your backup to another partition on the drive. What
I do is make a new full backup image each month, along with daily incremental
backups. And each month, when I make the full backup image, I copy it to a
thumb drive, which I then store out in my garage. That way even if there's a
fire or theft of the computer I still can do a full restoration to a new hard
drive.

I used to make my copy to a "spanned" set of CD's. But that was tedious. Now
I backup to a thumb drive. I've been buying 16 Gig. thumb drives for $30.
Also, you can use an external hard drive. That's even better.

There are several free utilities for making images. I haven't used any of
them, so I can't comment. But with Ghost and True Image, you can set the
program to make the backups automatically. I let Ghost make them at 3 AM each
day.

Also, the Ghost disk has a simple form of Windows on it. So if I can not
boot from Windows, I can still boot from the Ghost disk and do a system
restore. I think True Image is similar. And I know that True Image has a
"sandbox" so you can try out programs without installing them directly.

Read up on the two mentioned programs on their web sites. You'll then know
better what you need.

Milt

If I were you, I'd

"Caesar Romano" wrote:
On Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:13:01 -0700, Milt
wrote Re Using Zip for
backup/archive:

Caesar,

You may want to look at Symantec's Norton Ghost or Acrontis True Image. I'm
sure that many other dedicated backup programs are good too.

I use Norton Ghost. It allows me to automatically make a monthly backup and
daily incremental backups starting the first of each month. It also can split
those files into 700 Mb. or 4 Gig. files so that I can copy them to CD or
Thumb Drive that's formated for FAT 32.

Others probably do those things too. I'm just not familiar with them.

Milt

Thanks for the suggestions Milt. I should have mentioned two other
constraints. The solution needs to be freeware, and needs to backup to
the same drive (c:, the only drive available).
--
I filter all messages from google groups.

On 27 Wrz, 13:56, "http://books.google.com/books?
id=ifqnAAAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:%22Russ+Manning
%22&lr=&as_brr=0&rview=1&source=gbs_book_other_ver sions_r&cad=2"
wrote:
On 26 Wrz, 00:36, Milt wrote:



Caesar,

From some of your comments, I'm not sure that you understand the difference
between "copying" your C: drive and making an "image" of it. A copy will not
restore the drive if it fails. An image will.

Also, it's not a good practice to keep either a copy or an image on the
drive you're trying to protect the contents of. If the drive fails, you may
not be able to recover the contents of the backup! Also, each time you make
another backup, you will be copying the previous backup too. The size of data
will grow rapidly. And if the computer is damaged, you'll loose your backup.

At the very least, make your backup to another partition on the drive. What
I do is make a new full backup image each month, along with daily incremental
backups. And each month, when I make the full backup image, I copy it to a
thumb drive, which I then store out in my garage. That way even if there's a
fire or theft of the computer I still can do a full restoration to a new hard
drive.

I used to make my copy to a "spanned" set of CD's. But that was tedious. Now
I backup to a thumb drive. I've been buying 16 Gig. thumb drives for $30.
Also, you can use an external hard drive. That's even better.

There are several free utilities for making images. I haven't used any of
them, so I can't comment. But with Ghost and True Image, you can set the
program to make the backups automatically. I let Ghost make them at 3 AM each
day.

Also, the Ghost disk has a simple form of Windows on it. So if I can not
boot from Windows, I can still boot from the Ghost disk and do a system
restore. I think True Image is similar. And I know that True Image has a
"sandbox" so you can try out programs without installing them directly.

Read up on the two mentioned programs on their web sites. You'll then know
better what you need.

Milt

If I were you, I'd

"Caesar Romano" wrote:
On Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:13:01 -0700, Milt
wrote Re Using Zip for
backup/archive:

Caesar,

You may want to look at Symantec's Norton Ghost or Acrontis True Image. I'm
sure that many other dedicated backup programs are good too.

I use Norton Ghost. It allows me to automatically make a monthly backup and
daily incremental backups starting the first of each month. It also can split
those files into 700 Mb. or 4 Gig. files so that I can copy them to CD or
Thumb Drive that's formated for FAT 32.

Others probably do those things too. I'm just not familiar with them.

Milt

Thanks for the suggestions Milt. I should have mentioned two other
constraints. The solution needs to be freeware, and needs to backup to
the same drive (c:, the only drive available).
--
I filter all messages from google groups.

On 27 Wrz, 13:56, "http://books.google.com/books?
id=ifqnAAAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:%22Russ+Manning
%22&lr=&as_brr=0&rview=1&source=gbs_book_other_ver sions_r&cad=2"
wrote:
On 25 Wrz, 21:25, Caesar Romano wrote:



On Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:04:16 -0400, "Richard Urban"
wrote Re Using Zip for
backup/archive:

My personal feeling is that I will "never" use anything to backup that
compresses files or takes many files and coagulates them into one file.

I have seen way too many problems over the past 18 years where a person can
not get to his backups because of file corruption. If a .zip file containing
20,000 small files goes bad (it happens) you can't get to ANY file within
the container.

Just my thinking on the subject!

Good and valid point Richard.

However, that would be the case with any backup approach that uses a
single container file wouldn't it (e.g. DIxml image backup)? The only
way I can think of to avoid that is to make an uncompressed copy of
all the individual files on c: and that isn't an option due to disk
space limitations.
--
I filter all messages from google groups.

On 27 Wrz, 13:56, "http://books.google.com/books?
id=ifqnAAAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:%22Russ+Manning
%22&lr=&as_brr=0&rview=1&source=gbs_book_other_ver sions_r&cad=2"
wrote:
On 25 Wrz, 21:25, Caesar Romano wrote:



On Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:04:16 -0400, "Richard Urban"
wrote Re Using Zip for
backup/archive:

My personal feeling is that I will "never" use anything to backup that
compresses files or takes many files and coagulates them into one file.

I have seen way too many problems over the past 18 years where a person can
not get to his backups because of file corruption. If a .zip file containing
20,000 small files goes bad (it happens) you can't get to ANY file within
the container.

Just my thinking on the subject!

Good and valid point Richard.

However, that would be the case with any backup approach that uses a
single container file wouldn't it (e.g. DIxml image backup)? The only
way I can think of to avoid that is to make an uncompressed copy of
all the individual files on c: and that isn't an option due to disk
space limitations.
--
I filter all messages from google groups.

That's ten postings in a row consisting entirely of
quoted material, with no new material added.

That's ten postings in a row consisting entirely of
quoted material, with no new material added.