Thread: Burn to DVD?
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Old 06-18-2004, 09:54 PM
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sjk sjk is offline
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Join Date: May 2004
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multi-disk CD/DVD support and backup strategy

Quote:
Originally Posted by dnanian
However, Retrospect -- while more complex -- will certainly meet your needs.
Impression has the ability to create multi-disk DVD backups, with enough scratch space (see developer comment).

The rest of this might be better as a separate post but since I've already started composing it (and prepending this comment now) I'll leave it here since this isn't a particularly busy forum.

I'm in the process of designing a strategy for regular backups of my eMac and iBook using a combination of FireWire and CD/DVD media storage. I'd like to do monthly (or maybe bi-monthly) clone backups to FireWire, with some type of "incremental" backups in between. Certain directory hierarchies would be backed up to CD/DVD at different intervals, some for permanent archival.

I'm mostly familiar with traditional UNIX dump/restore utilities using different levels (0-9) to control what's saved relative to a previous backup level, with level 0 being a complete backup. An advantage with that is full backups can be saved to one media destination and incrementals to others. In my case, full (clone?) eMac/iBook backups could each exist in separate FireWire volumes, and "incrementals" for both could be written as file archives to another volume on the same drive. Fully automating this would be ideal.

My backups to CD/DVD can be distinct from fulls/incrementals, with their own schedule. The second volume of my eMac and/or one on the FireWire drive can be temporarily used for image creation. For example, my local mailstore fits on a single CD and it's trivial to generate a mountable disk image of that using a command like "hdiutil create -srcfolder Mail /Volumes/Space/Mail-20040618.dmg", then burning it at my convenience. Partly automating this would be ideal.

Lastly, there's miscellaneous multimedia data currently on the second volume of my eMac that I want backed up at irregular intervals depending on how it changes. That's the most uncertain part of all this because of the large data sizes involved. Copying some to the FireWire drive may work, while some might best be written to multiple DVDs. Some of this might be automated, some not.

It's still unclear which Apple HFS+ backup products can offer that functionality and I'm open to using a combination of them, within budget. For various reasons Retrospect is not an option.

So, can SuperDuper! be folded into that proposed strategy? I'm also trying to wrap my mind around other ways to achieve a comfortable combination of disaster recovery, regular backups, and archival backups. During about ten years of the ufsdump/ufsrestore (comparable to dump/restore on OS X for UFS filesystems) usage on Sun Solaris systems at home (before migrating to OS X) I never had any irrecoverable files except for a few unimportant ones after a major disaster recovery. That level of data integrity seems elusive with OS X and HFS+ volumes. Actually ditto (which Carbon Copy Cloner is a front-end for) has proven itself the most reliable utility I've used so far, but now I'm exploring further to support the strategy I just explained.

Sometime later I may be interested in synchronization between the eMac and iBook. For that I'm curious about ChronoSync. It's nearly as highly rated on VersionTracker as SuperDuper! (exclamation point) and seems reasonably priced for its functionality. As a backup utility (not synchronization) it doesn't seem to support multi-disk CD/DVD capability, but that may be irrelevant.

Enough, whew. That was sure more than I intended to write when I started.

Last edited by sjk; 06-18-2004 at 09:57 PM. Reason: typos
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