Cobain Backup
I just automated all my backups using a FREE backup program called Cobain Backup. I used an XP machine with a few hundred free gigabytes of hard drive space. It’s the same machine I use to stream TV to the rest of the house. From this one machine I backup my desktop machine, my server and my laptop. The backup task is scheduled for the wee hours of the night (Cobain runs as a service). On the first night it does a full backup and for the next six days it does incremental backups. The next week, it starts fresh with a full backup.
On top of copying all my files to this XP machine, Cobain also zip’s the files into password protected archives using strong encryption (Blowfish, Rijndael or DES). Each archive is also chopped into 4.7 GB pieces so they will each fit on one DVD. There are also filters to include/exclude certain file types in the archive. For instance, I didn’t want all the podcast files on my computer to be backed up, so I filtered out all files with the MP3 extension.
It’s pretty slick for free software.
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:01 pm
[...] I don’t chance things. I have one computer that does nothing but backups. During the night, it runs Cobain Backup and gets all the important information from my machines, my wife’s machine and the servers. The backups are saved onto a USB drive which is swapped out once a week. I have three 250 GB USB drives. One is always connected to the backup computer, one is waiting on the shelf and one is at my office at UF. I am happy to report that in twenty years of using PCs, I haven’t only lost a significant amount of data one time… in 1989. I have lost an hour’s worth of work here and there do to a computer crash right in the middle of a project, but never more than that. [...]
February 28th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
[...] one time I used Cobain Backup to automate my backups at night. Last year I switched to Microsoft’s SyncToy. Cobain and [...]