Looking for reliable back up software

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Kirstie

Kirstie

PFG, Picture Framing God
Joined
Jan 16, 2007
Posts
8,395
Loc
Berkeley, CA
If you read my Western Digital woes thread you will see that I had to dump their software and that I need to find back up software for the two PCs to run the back up drives. The WD software was slowing the computers to a crawl. (Not fot POS computers. The host computer will soon be a mac.)

Any suggestions for a software that won't hog half the ram on the computers?
 
What works for you????

Kirstie,

As I understand it, what we really need to do is back up POS database regardless of what software we use. We aren't really protecting ourselves by backing up software.

So with that in mind, we simply have a secondary hard drive installed in our server. Every night after hours, it creates a duplicate hard drive. In a scenario where the Server hard drive would fail........switch out...and we're up and running.

We also use jump drives to back up the two key pieces of data: Our POS database and Quickbooks database. Our bookkeeper backs up both when she's here. I back up the POS when I'm there. Sarah backs up as well.

Nothing running in the background during operating hours and PC's work just fine.

John
 
Yes, John this is exactly what we need. What software do you use for your external hard drives and do you leave your computers on after hours so they can back up? The back up software that came with Western /digital drives is not working for us.When it is idle it is still using a huge amount of ram. I am about to go out and buy something like Retrospect Express for PC.
 
Calling on Professionals...

Kirstie,

The back up hard drive for the server PC is INTERNAL, and I believe it is MS task scheduling used to copy the C drive over to the D drive. No special hardware. This task is scheduled after hours. (I use my local IT specialist to set this up - I don't do it myself) :)

The server and all PC's are on 24/7. POS is closed down daily. Normal operating system cleaning and de-frag is done about every 2-3 weeks on all PC's. RAM use is not an issue.

BTW - I do use Retrospect Express with an External 120Gig Hard Drive to back up my laptop at home. It has worked extremely well.

John
 
There has to be a setting to only allow a once a day incremental back up.
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I don't trust those external drives as the only form of backup, in a business environment. Not only do they overheat easily, and are slow, but it sounds like you could be overwriting on top of the same backup every day. If your database gets corrupted, and then it automatically overwrites your only backup - you might be left with nothing at all. :mad: Incremental can be dangerous, depending on the s/w.

The same concern applies to fire, theft, intentional damage from an employee, virus, or an act of nature. An electrical storm strike would likely blow out the pc AND the connected external drive at the same time.

To back up a multi-pc database, it usually means none of the computers can be USING the program at the time of backup. If someone is using the database, records may be locked - and the important files might be skipped entirely.

For these reasons, I don't suggest leaving a backup running 24/7. I also don't suggest using only one backup device. To be effective, you need multiple generations of backups. (Ie do you want go to back to last night, the night before, or 4 days ago?)

It's probably best to do the backup as part of your daily closing routine, so you can be sure all pc's are out of the application and that none of the files you wish to back up are in use. Backing up our POS only takes 2-5 seconds per day, using flash drives.

I encourage you to check with Carol and Bert for their backup requirements/recommendations, but a series of these may be a very affordable and viable solution: http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=208403525 $9.77 each, shipped. 2gb each

It's also good to have a full backup of your pos folder, documents, accounting, etc. These don't necessarily have to be daily, however. It depends how often those items are usually updated. In our shop, we use a rotation of 6 flash drives to back up LifeSaver every day (we are open 6 days per week, and have them labeled as such).

Every Saturday, I do a FULL backup of the accounting, documents, and pos folders. (I do this via the internet, and store it on the HOME computer).

The first of each month, we burn a 5 cent CDR with the same info, and put those in the fire safe at home.

Are you sure that you need to back up the CMC pc? Very little changes, and if you crash you will need to re-install from the CD and get a new activation code. We copied our folder to an external hard drive, but don't regularly back it up. Any important files/cmc custom jobs are saved to the server machine, and get backed up through the weekly process. We have a shared network drive that the CMC pc can access for this purpose.

I'm sorry this got so long, and hope it has some useful tips.

Mike
 
Kirstie

After years of dealing with backup systems, discs, software, hardware and the related issues, we recently subscribed to Carbonite.com. It is an off site back up system that backs up the entire system anytime a change is detected to a file. The cost is something like $49.95 per year. You can go to their site and try it free for 14 days.

Our frameready program provides an automatic backup daily at a designated time and is stored on our server hard drive. (one separate back up for each day of the week) Carbonite, then detects a change to the frameready file for that day and backs it up automatically. I also run a backup disc weekly, of our frameready files and a disc backup of our quicken files each time I log out. (just an old habit) However, carbonite also runs a backup any the time a file is changed. And it backs up everything....save a word document...it's backed up. Add some family photos....backed up. It even backs up our wizard file as we save new designs.

The beauty of the system is that it is an immediate, automatic, backup. It is stored off site so your files are safe in the event of fire, theft, or just plain hard drive crash. And they can be accessed from any other computer in the event you need to restore your system. And the best feature of all....you don't have to be a techie to figure it out.

It's GREAT!
 
Our frameready program provides an automatic backup daily at a designated time and is stored on our server hard drive. (one separate back up for each day of the week)
Click to expand...

Thanks for explaining. I wasn't sure how FR handles backups. It sounds like it is making multiple generations of backups, which are not file locked, to be easily backed up. I have always wondered how they did it.

Ours (LS) is similar, and does the backup during the daily closing process. The files are compressed into a single ZIP file. ie monday.zip tuesday.zip etc and export to a flash drive/zip drive/hard drive/cd burner/floppy. It only takes a few seconds.

I wonder how SS does it.

As long as it isn't only keeping a single backup, and you can go back 2 or more days, if the newest one becomes corrupt - you're good. If it is making a different backupset for each day, then this is addressed. It's also good to get the backups off the same machine or network, in case of a virus/surge/burglary.

Mike
 
I echo John’s approval for Retrospect. I have been using the Desktop version for over eight years.

With Retrospect, you can back up onto almost all media – tapes, CDs, DVDs. I use CDs.

I back up only once a week rather than daily, but even at that it takes up less than a minute to do the weekly back up.

With Retrospect you may filter any files and folders that you don’t wish to save, like cache files, for example, or image files bigger than a certain size, or temporary files, or aliases etc.

Once the original base backup of your entire system is finished (and that may take several hours) each subsequent back up is incremental i.e. saving only those files that are new or have been modified. Its a great time and space saver.

In the eight years I have been doing so, my entire system is stored on only 17 CDs.

This past weekend I royally screwed up some new pages that I was working on for my web site. With Retrospect, I was able to go back and retrieve the entire archived web site that I had been tweaking for over five years. If I had so chosen I would have been able to extract any page that had been changed from any date during that time.

I highly recommend Retrospect.
 
I use Acronis True Image to "mirror" the entire hard drive in each of our five computers about once a month. I bring from home the three 250 GB external hard drives I keep there, and "mirror" all of the hard drives on all three of them. So, once a month (or whenever I like) I get three complete backups of each computer. According to the Acronis instructions, I should be able to switch out one of these external drives for an internal drive, and have all files, settings & configurations as they were at the last backup.

Every day we backup our QuickBooks Pro and FrameReady critical files to separate compact flash or thumb drives, which we take home. Using four drives in rotation for each of these programs, we always have the past four days on separate portable storage devices.

There's no such thing as too many backups, in my opinion.
 
We have RAID on our office computer where all our programs and data reside so we have consistency during the day. Then we have a network hard drive that plugs into our router that we back up all our computers to nightly. It's a 250 G drive. While most of the critical information we need is on our office computer, it's good to have the rest backed up too. I'd like to have RAID on all my computers. Seems like we have a lot electrical flucuations that seem to cause problems with our hard drives.
 
Raid is excellent for a busy server, is faster than just a single drive, and can help you limp along until one of the failed drives can be replaced. (i.e.: no downtime!) However, corruption or infection are just as likely to be a problem.

It's best to have multiple generations of backups, and not all in the "same basket". Hopefully it doesnt overwrite the same stuff every day on the external drive, but keeps the days apart? (today, yesterday, the day before, etc)

If a power surge hit while you were doing a backup/plugged in, it could fry your raid array and the only backup device. (or if you accidentally back up corrupted files and overwrite your only backup).

Even 2 devices rotated every other day, is many times safer than one, IMO.

I hope you don't mind my opinion,
Mike
 
Your opinion is valued and appreciated. We do have Executive Backup to backup to other media that is stored off site.

I was investigating some other POS software for our clothing. The company I'm interested in does a complete off site back up of changed files every 15 minutes (unless there have been no changes). Then a complete backup of all data is made 2x daily. Plus all software changes are provided. It's an interesting proposal. The backup of their software and our data is included in the monthly fee ($60 that includes all upgrades) but if you want them to store all your data, it's a little bit extra. It's a very interesting proposal.
 
Mike Labbe @ GTP said:
Raid is excellent for a busy server, is faster than just a single drive, and can help you limp along until one of the failed drives can be replaced. (i.e.: no downtime!) However, corruption or infection are just as likely to be a problem.

It's best to have multiple generations of backups, and not all in the "same basket". Hopefully it doesnt overwrite the same stuff every day on the external drive, but keeps the days apart? (today, yesterday, the day before, etc)

If a power surge hit while you were doing a backup/plugged in, it could fry your raid array and the only backup device. (or if you accidentally back up corrupted files and overwrite your only backup).

Even 2 devices rotated every other day, is many times safer than one, IMO.

I hope you don't mind my opinion,
Mike
Click to expand...

I would be careful as what I actually labeled a "RAID" array. Almost all modern motherboards have a hard drive controller that is capable of "RAID", the problem with most of these is that its not as hardware based as one would think. The control relies heavily on its Windows (or Linux) drivers to actually work. The translation of this is means that many types of data corruption will still occur. Because these are not truly hardware level RAID controllers THEY DO NOT OFFER THE SAME LEVEL OF PROTECTION.

Although external drives are slower, this doesn't mean their data holding is any less. People also complain they heat up more than internal. Not true, external drives are the same as internals (literally the same thing, just put into a SATA/PATA to USB adapter and a external power source) They may seem like they get hotter, but only because you are actually able to see and touch it. Normally that heat would just mix in with the rest of the system and go unnoticed.

The best backup is a combination of the things stated above. Ideally you could run a RAID-1 (mirror) and mount one of the drives in an removable cage. In that removable cage, you would have 2 cartridges, use DriveA for 1 week and then swap it with DriveB the next week. This way you have at least a week back of copy. On Mondays while the RAID rebuilds and updates the swap drive, it will run a little slower for an hour or so, but nothing to the extent of problems you had with the WD software. Once in a while, its also good to make a drive image with Acronis (best software for the purpose, has definately surpassed Norton Ghost for this) this way you have a backup against fatal faults that get transfered to all 3 drives as well as failures of the RAID controller itsself.

Good Luck!
 
mayos said:
Most of the RAID I've been aquainted with is set up through the system's BIOS and motherboard.
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That would be a 'hardware raid'.

The combined drives appear as one drive to the operating system.

In a 'software raid', the operating systems sees the drives as individual drives and makes the determination as to how to right the files to which drive.
 
And RAID-1 is the mirroring back-up hardware RAID. RAID-0 is a method to use both drives as one to speed up read/write. Saying that you have RAID does not tell all.
 
Yep, we use RAID 1. Love it. It's saved our bacon several times. The electricity in our town is pretty "dirty" (lots of flucuations, brown outs, etc) so it's pretty hard on our drives. Was constantly having problems until we went with RAID.
 
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