Hi.

This may well have been asked, and indeed answered, before, but I can't immediately find an answer. So, here goes.

Does anyone know of any reliable, and preferably not too expensive, software for backing up things on a windows XP system? To be more precise, what I'd like to be able to do is poke the shutdown button and have the machine automatically run the backup software, save everything to the backup media, verify it, then continue to shutdown normally. At the moment I am backing up my work to DVDRAM disks manually, which works quite nicely, but it relies on me remembering to actually DO it

I had an incident today involving the electricity supplier's inability to consistently supply electricity, and as a result now have to reinstall the cad box from scratch. This is a two day job Luckily, I have a backup of all the critical data that's only a couple of days out of date, and even more luckily I was able to mount the drive on another machine and get the newer stuff off it, even though the drive just bluescreens on boot in the original box. Still a pain, but not a disaster.

I've ordered a biggish UPS to prevent a repeat, but it's pushed me to the point of wanting to sort it out once and for all.

The linux box is easy, it backs up the critical files over the network onto a NAS box via a cron job every night, but then it's on all the time anyway, and has a UPS. The windows boxes are more of a problem, since doing a backup while I'm using the things slows them down to a crawl, and is at the wrong point in any case.

Suggestions?

pca

Rsync for Windows.

I run it during lunch hour every day. Doesn't take long since it's
only getting the changed files.

I've been installing SyncBack on people's computers. I think it's a good program. It can back up to another folder, an external drive, FTP, whatever. I don't know whether it can behave exactly as you're looking for, though. The only scheduling it has is through the Windows scheduler. I just checked the options you have when creating a backup plan, and I didn't see any option to run at shutdown. That will probably be a tough thing to find, I would imagine.

I would suggest doing it the other way around. Find a program that will give you the option to shut down when finished.

But really, I don't think either option is very good. You shouldn't rely on manual backups. Get the software, and make it run on a schedule. Run it every day, or repeatedly throughout the day. I just checked SyncBack's options, and you don't even have to use the Windows Scheduler. You can make it run at preset intervals like every hour.


*edit*
If you want to check out SyncBack, click on the link above and scroll down to version 3.x. That's the free one.

That's the point, I want to make it run on a schedule. The schedule is when I shut the machine down, which happens every day! It seems to make sense to run it when I'm not using it, and after all the changes to the filesystem have been made, ie when I'm finished for the day.

Running it while I'm working seems to be a bad idea, if only because it will slow things down quite a lot.

If the machine was on all the time I would set it up to run in the middle of the night, as per the linux box, but the work machines are off when not in use, due to both the noise and the power costs.

I'll have a look at both syncback and rsync for windows, thanks.

pca

Karen's Replicator is free, pretty robust with good error logging, has very powerful user interface, and has a built-in scheduler.

As far as I know, it will NOT run automatically on shutdown so is probably not what you are looking for, but if you leave your Windows computers running it will do the backups automatically.

tanstaafl.

You should be able to run anything at shutdown by using a "policy". Open the policy editor (easiest way is to Start->Run "gpedit.msc"; otherwise as an mmc snap-in). Shutdown scripts are under Local Computer Policy->Computer Configuration->Windows Settings->Scripts. I don't know remember if I've ever used this, so I'm not 100% sure that it will wait for the script to end before continuing shutdown, but it ought to. Of course, that depends in part on getting the program you want to run to not immediately hand control back to the script as soon as it starts.

and if that doesn't work then the alternative is to create a script that runs the backup and then calls the "shutdown -s" command. Then just put that as an icon on the desktop or start menu and run that to shut the machine down.

That still relies on whatever backup tool you use not returning until it has done its stuff.

Seriously, a really good option here could be to install Linux native on the box, and then VMware Server (free), or VMware Workstation (payware), on top of that. And then install XP inside VMware, and run it that way.

Then you can easily automate anything about the box that you want, including on-the-fly backups (or at shutdown, or..), with the added bonus of having VMware snapshots (one for Server, or an entire tree of snapshots for Workstation) to do instant system saves/restores at will.

Cheers

The only other assistance I can offer is that SyncBack will let you specify programs to run after a backup is complete. As far as I can tell it'll only launch executables, but maybe there's a way to tell Windows to shut down using an exe file?

If it can run a cmd file, shutdown -s works nicely. OOPS, missed that up there.

There was a recent article in the Boston Globe about backing up personal computers and it discussed two companies that were in the market.
One of them, Mozy, will backup 2gb of data for free, with an all you can eat plan for $4.95/month.
They also do businesses (define as MS server OSes) and that will cost you more. No they don't do Linux, but they do do OS X 10.4 and above.

In the interest of full discloser, yes I used to work for EMC, but no I am not pimping this so Moshe can buy a new helicopter.

I can't find anywhere on the site about the 2GB freebie?

Doesn't Moshe work at some IBM startup now?

Bottom left hand side of this page:

http://mozy.com/home

It appears that I'm going blind...

He started XIV which was purchased by IBM earlier this year.