What to get that someone you love for [December Holiday of Choice]

[yesthattom]

As a system administrator, I can’t recommend anything better than the gift of good backups. For $200 you can get a 300G external USB hard drive that will be able to backup your loved one’s laptop multiple times (it’s always good to have weekly backups going back 3-4 weeks) plus provide plenty of room for extra photos, and so on.

If you really feel generous, buy two so they can make a backup and keep it off-site.

Rather than trying to guess which files to pick and choose, use a drive that is so large they can just click “back up EVERYTHING” and be done with it. I know I used to spend hours trying to narrow down my backups to just the right files that would fit on a disk. Each time I swear I picked a different set of files. Inconsistency is bad. It was really liberating to finally get an external drive bigger than my computer’s disk, so I could just click “backup everything”

A lot of drives have a button on them that automatically starts the backup process. That makes it a no-brainer to do backups.

Comments

[cos]

A lot of drives have a button on them that automatically starts the backup process. That makes it a no-brainer to do backups.

Unfortunately, that usually means using the bundled backup software, and most bundled backup software sucks. Which you often only find out when you need to restore, and end up taking a day or two to get your system back to mostly how it was, but with some things not quite right. I ran into that issue with the idiotic backup program that came bundled with the 200G Seagate external drive I bought a year and a half ago.

For OS X, I recommend SuperDuper. Buy the pay version for $28, it's only a little bit to add to the cost of the drive, and it'll be worth it.

For geeky types, rsnapshot is a nifty way of backing up your Unix box remotely using rsync, but with incrementals. And since OS X is unix and runs rsync, you can use it to back up onto an external drive connected to your Mac.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

BounceBack Express runs great on a Mac. Extremely fast, and easy to set up. It's a good solution until the new Mac OS arrives with the TimeMachine backup system.

On the Windows BounceBack takes a long time, but does the job. I'm sure there are other products, but this one seems reliable for me.

[cos]

BounceBack Express was exactly the culprit! Sure, it runs great and is easy to set up. It also doesn't reliably back up metadate, and sucks for a restore. If your hard disk dies and you want to recover your system from a BBExpress backup, you're in for a lot of effort and pain. And once you succeed, you're likely to still find out that some of your applications are no longer applications, etc.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Ah, you are looking for a "bare metal restore" product. That's great for servers, but for non-servers my philosophy is "(1) re-load the OS from DVD, (2) copy the backup into a subdirectory, (3) move files you want into my home directory, (4) after a certain amount of time anything that is left in the subdirectory gets wiped."

Tom

[cos]

But why? First, you're not likely to have the space to copy the backup onto your new drive and have a fully installed OS, because people tend to fill up their drives. Second, is it really satsifying to just get your data back, but not all your apps and related configuration? Particularly if you have more than one user on your computer.

With SuperDuper you can very very easily make a bootable image and keep updating it. If you have a large enough external disk, you can occasionally keep an old one around, and start making a new up to date image. If you ever want to just copy some files off it, you mount the image and browse around. But if you lose everything, you have an easy complete restore.

I think your view of "non-servers" is not the typical home computer situation. If I were talking about client laptops people use for work at an office, sure - the config is pretty standard, and all people want are a few of their directories of files they've made or kept around. But on a standalone home computer, I think people want everything - their full setup, with all the apps they've purchased and installed already there.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I totally agree with you WRT macs. For Windows boxes, I don't trust bringing back and EXE any way other than the Install program that put it there originally.

I would be glad to find software for Windows that was good enough to change my mind.

(As far as the disk space concern... usually when people lose a drive they buy a new one that is 2x bigger than their old one. If they don't, the external drive just becomes where they have their old data.)

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

oh, ignore previous post.

but oh my god, that's brutal. I mean, sure, on my step-mom's machine that'd just be a couple of hours. On my dad's, about 35 hours of work is what it took me to migrate him from 98/millenium to XP, and most of that time was installing apps, telling them their prefs, and testing to make sure they saw their data.

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

what about the windows registry?