Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
HowTo EASILY create image backup?
f0dder:
[almost off topic] What is in general the benefit of FAT32, since some people swear to it? [/almost off topic]-Curt (April 16, 2008, 07:48 AM)
--- End quote ---
Some people believe that it's "omfg faster!!!", but those people should really be ignored. The only tangible advantage is that more operating systems can handle FAT, whereas NTFS support in non-NT systems is either slow (ntfs3g) or non-existent.
NTFS is more stable than FAT (it has journaled filesystem metadata <3), has faster file searching, support individual files larger than 4 gigabytes, has better access control (not needed for home users, but wonderful in the corporate world), and has a number of other more technical advantages.
patthecat:
Given the numerous advantages to NTFS, some people prefer to stick with FAT file systems since some non-windows systems such as MAC and Linux can read and write to it.
Although some Linux variants are starting to support read only access to disks formatted with the NTFS file system.
f0dder:
patthecat: linux has offered read-only NTFS for many, many years... and there's stable write access as well, albeit pretty slow.
Curt:
Cobian Backup - Powerful Free Backup Software
A few weeks ago we demonstrated an extremely simple backup solution called IdleBackup. It was nothing too fancy, and this time around we wanted to go to the other extreme with a freeware Windows backup application that will really knock your socks off. The program is called Cobian Backup, and I wouldn’t have found it without Leland’s help.
Cobian Backup is one of the most full-featured backup utilities that I’ve seen, and the best thing about it is that it’s completely free. I’ve been a proud owner of SyncBackSE for quite some time now, but Cobian Backup includes almost all of the same features in it’s latest version 9 Beta release. The interface is well designed, creating and scheduling backups is simple, and it is busting at the seams with customization!
HowTo EASILY create image backup?
–Features–
Now I could have just listed off the features that the developer had put together, but I actually think the developer is rather modest of what the program is truly capable of. So I put together my own set of features highlighting all of the things that I find to be the most useful in Cobian:
* Can be installed as a service, which means it is able to run even when a user isn’t logged into the computer
* 3 different types of backups are available:
o Full backups: Every single file in the source will be copied or compressed. If you are overwriting, every file will be replaced. If Overwrite is unchecked, you will have several copies of the same source.
o Incremental: The program will check if the source has been changed from the last backup. If there is no need to copy the file, it will be skipped, saving backup time. The incremental procedure checks the Archive bit attribute of the file. You may want to manually reset the attribute to force a full backup: use the “Set the archive attributes” on the Task menu.
o Differential: The program will check if the source has been changed from the last FULL backup. If there is no need to copy the file, it will be skipped, saving backup time. The differential procedure checks the Archive bit attribute of the file. You may want to manually reset the attribute to force a full backup: use the “Set the archive attributes” on the Task menu.
o Dummy task: This backup doesn’t need a source or a destination. It is useful to use the task just as an scheduler to execute applications, close services, reboot the computer, etc.
* Remotely connect to and manage your backups (Cobian will need to be installed on both the host and client machine to do this). Go to Tools -> Remote Client in Cobian to access this feature.
* Backup to or from a network or FTP location
* Compress your backups using 7-Zip or regular ZIP
o Split the compressed files up into multiple files according to a maximum size that you specify
* You can have multiple source and/or destinations
* You can have a timestamp added to backup filenames so that existing backups are not overwritten
* Perform a variety of actions before and/or after a backup starts:
o Pause for a specified duration
o Start or close a program
o Start or stop a service
o Restart or shutdown the computer
* If you choose to perform an incremental or differential backup you can set Cobian to automatically do a full backup every X backups, where “X” is any number you want.
* It will retrieve files from the Volume Shadow Copy (on XP and Vista) if a file is locked by another application
* You can provide a list of files and/or folders to exclude
* UNICODE support
(.....)
Cobian Backup is a tremendous application that will likely have much, if not all of what you’re looking for. It might take some time to get the backups setup just the way you want, but once you’re done the end result could save you days of frustration. Believe me, in the last two years I’ve had two different hard drives fail on me. If it wasn’t for the regular backups that I performed there could have been a lot of unrecoverable settings, pictures, and documents. Software like Cobian Backup can really come through in a pinch!
Cobian Backup Homepage: http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm
Note: In this review I was using Cobian Backup 9 Beta.
Copyright © 2008 CyberNet |-CyberNotes
--- End quote ---
tomos:
I dont think Cobain will restore your windows though -
that was part of what you wanted, wasnt it?
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version