back that thang up.

May 12, 2008 5:14 PM

recommendations for good system back-up software programs?

asking for a friend's small business working on both mac and PC formats. can anyone recommend back up programs for mac and for PC that will backup the entire system, not just individual files? they are willing to pay for the programs.

posted by violetk to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Never used it, but this seems perfect for your task.
posted by gjc at 6:05 PM on May 12, 2008

And by this, I mean this:

http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
posted by gjc at 6:05 PM on May 12, 2008

For the Macs you probably want to have a look at Super Duper.
posted by bcwinters at 7:41 PM on May 12, 2008 [1 favorite]

Mac is easier; I've been using the FREE CarbonCopyCloner software to back up my home Mac for years (there may be something newer, better now, but it does what I want). It will create a bootable clone of a Mac's entire HD; meaning that you clone the whole thing to another HD (I use an external Firewire drive that I keep away from home) -= if you need some lost file, or the HD in your Mac totally fails, you can just connect the clone, choose it as the Startup Disk, and off you go the clone acts as the new HD. I've even used it to pretend I had a portable Mac by using my clone on someone else's Mac. (on preview- I've heard good things about SuperDuper, too.)

For Windows, there's a lot of competing products out there, with various other features - most of them filed under "disk imaging". That's what people are talking about when they don't want to back up files, the want to back up the entire computer, OS and all.
I'm sure people will post reviews that they like or dislike about Ghost, Acronis True Image, etc. If you just want to make a full copy of the HD in a Windows machine , then all you need to do is clone the HD to another drive - that kind of software is free for the googling. But that takes a while depending on the size of the HD you're cloning. And with Windows, you can't use a clone made on one set of hardware with another set of hardware (HD failure? just replace it with the clone. Threw the PC in a lake, and need a new box? Your clone won't work unless you can buy a new box exactly like the old one.)
You might want to shop for something that can do incremental backups (copy the whole thing once, then just update quickly with new changes) and/or can take your disk image backed up from one set of hardware and later deploy to different hardware if you need to. If you have that kind of setup, you can even do your disk imaging over a network, so they're always up to date. Costs rise as features do, of course.

Just keep your backup cloned HDs or images in some place that the PC itself is not, for safety's sake. Storage is cheap; having your backups NOT be in the building when it burns down is priceless.
posted by bartleby at 8:16 PM on May 12, 2008

I've never used it but I've heard good things about Bacula. I believe you need to set up a dedicated server to run the server software. Looks like Mac and PC are supported on the client side.

Wikipedia has a list of free and commercial suites.

Remember to make offsite backups!
posted by lalas at 8:39 PM on May 12, 2008

Which PC operating system are you using?

As of Vista, Microsoft has made it damned difficult to back up. (The one GJC linked to doesn't support Vista.)

I finally ended up with Acronis True Image as a backup tool. It was supposed to be able to back up just the system state, but every time I tried it the backup program hung.

It has an alternate mode where it does a full backup of the entire drive, and that worked pretty well -- though I've never tried to restore from such a backup, so maybe I was wasting my time, which I won't find out until I need it.

It seems to have worked, but you can't mark me down as an enthusiastic user, given that the "selective backup" mode that I purchased it for didn't work as advertised.

Windows up to XP included a native backup program that worked surprisingly well, but it turns out that Microsoft didn't own it, and as of Vista they decided they didn't want to update it again and were tired of paying royalties. So it's not included in Vista. And even if you copy it over (say, from an XP computer) it won't work, because Microsoft reorganized the registry again, and made some other changes.

There is a backup program but only in the topmost version of Vista, and even it doesn't back up everything. I find that to be really scandalous; it's one of the things about Vista that really pissed me off.

When I was looking for a solution and did some research, the only commercial solutions I was able to find were the Acronis one I bought, and one from Norton -- and I've been burned by Symantec way too many times, and don't trust them any more.
posted by Class Goat at 9:35 PM on May 12, 2008

Some links: Ars Technica on Vista Backups, Microsoft's official word on Vista backups.

And if you have a different opinion of Symantec than I do, here's their Vista backup solution.
posted by Class Goat at 9:44 PM on May 12, 2008