Backing up both Mac and Windows computers

>As is true for many, I use Macintosh at home and Windows for work.
>I'd like to backup my iMac and iBook, as well as some key folders
>from my Windows laptop. I'm thinking of getting a 200GB Maxtor or
>Mercury Elite to do this. Is this possible to do on one large
>external FireWire/USB hard drive, and if possible, is it practical?
>
>What kinds of issues and surprises will I find trying to backup some
>windows files on what is esentially a Mac formatted harddrive?

To answer your question: I backup two Macs (one OS X, one OS 9) and a
Windows machine on an external FireWire drive using Retrospect, which
runs on the OS X machine. No problems. Retrospect behaves very well
cross-platform and writes to disk file, external drive, DVD, CD, etc.

To answer a question you didn't ask: In addition, I run nightly
backups of all three machines on DVD. For the DVDs, I backup data
files, screening out system and most applications, cache, trash
folders, etc. For the external hard drive, I back up everything.

I backup to three DVD sets (MWF, T-Th, and Weekend). One of these is
at work at all times, the other two are here. That way, I always have
one off-site backup.

Definitely consider a second backup to different media! Otherwise, a
fire or theft would result in loss of EVERYthing. And if your backup
is bad (e.g. media issue, incorrect script), you never know until you
try to restore. At which point, you are totally screwed unless you
have an additional backup. A network backup would be another way to
achieve this.

On Dec 27, 2004, at 11:33 AM, travis_belton wrote:

> As is true for many, I use Macintosh at home and Windows for work. I'd
> like to backup my iMac and iBook, as well as some key folders from my
> Windows laptop. I'm thinking of getting a 200GB Maxtor or Mercury
> Elite to do this. Is this possible to do on one large external
> FireWire/USB hard drive, and if possible, is it practical?
>
> What kinds of issues and surprises will I find trying to backup some
> windows files on what is esentially a Mac formatted harddrive?

Primarily, you'll find that your Windows PC can't see the hard drive if
it's Mac-formatted. There's some commercial software out there called
MacOpener which will let your PC use the drive.

<http://www.miramar.com/Products/PC_MACLAN/mac_opener.html>

I haven't used MacOpener for a very long time, but it worked quite well
in the old days.

Alternately, you could format your drive for the PC and back up your
Macs to it, but you'll find that as a regular backup device, you're
MUCH better off using the native file system. Not only will performance
be greater, but there are many file names and additional Mac bits of
data which are not reliably copied across file systems.

--Nik

At 9:56 PM -0800 2004/12/28, Nik wrote:
>On Dec 27, 2004, at 11:33 AM, travis_belton wrote:
>
>>As is true for many, I use Macintosh at home and Windows for work. I'd
>>like to backup my iMac and iBook, as well as some key folders from my
>>Windows laptop. I'm thinking of getting a 200GB Maxtor or Mercury
>>Elite to do this. Is this possible to do on one large external
>>FireWire/USB hard drive, and if possible, is it practical?
>>
>> What kinds of issues and surprises will I find trying to backup some
>>windows files on what is esentially a Mac formatted harddrive?
>
>Primarily, you'll find that your Windows PC can't see the hard drive if
>it's Mac-formatted. There's some commercial software out there called
>MacOpener which will let your PC use the drive.
>
><http://www.miramar.com/Products/PC_MACLAN/mac_opener.html>
>
>I haven't used MacOpener for a very long time, but it worked quite well
>in the old days.
>
>Alternately, you could format your drive for the PC and back up your
>Macs to it, but you'll find that as a regular backup device, you're
>MUCH better off using the native file system. Not only will performance
>be greater, but there are many file names and additional Mac bits of
>data which are not reliably copied across file systems.

        If you need to back up a Mac and a PC, without using
MacOpener you can a) back up the Mac and PC to a single FAT file
system, or b) partition the drive and back up Macs to HFS+ and
Windows PC(s) to NTFS (or FAT).

        FAT is a pretty poor filesystem, which is why PC users are
always defragmenting and futzing about with Norton Utilities. It also
doesn't support permissions, and is *extremely* inefficient on large
disks, such as 200gb (lots of wasted space, which HFS+ mostly solved).

        If you want to use a single partition, you could format the
whole disk FAT (probably how it ships from Maxtor) and back up the
Macs to a disk image, in which case the underlying filesystem doesn't
matter so much. The .dmg file would be a single file on the FAT
filesystem, and isolate the Mac reads/writes (which would occur on
the image's HFS+ file system) from the minimal access to the
underlying FAT filesystem, required for expanding or opening the .dmg
file.

                                                Chris
--
Chris Pepper: <http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/>
Rockefeller University: <http://www.rockefeller.edu/>

On Dec 29, 2004, at 8:26 PM, Chris Pepper wrote:

> If you need to back up a Mac and a PC, without using MacOpener you
> can a) back up the Mac and PC to a single FAT file system, or b)
> partition the drive and back up Macs to HFS+ and Windows PC(s) to NTFS
> (or FAT).

I've never been able to get Disk Utility/Drive Setup to partition a
disk with both HFS+ and FAT32 filesystems. Is there a trick to get this
to work?

--Nik

At 10:33 AM 12/27/2004 -0800, travis_belton wrote:
>What kinds of issues and surprises will I find trying to backup some
>windows files on what is esentially a Mac formatted harddrive?

I gather you're talking about moving the hard disk from one computer to
another to do backups.

I'd advise against this, because it's a manual step that has to be done for
every backup. Required manual steps are a recipe for skipping backups.

Moe Rubenzahl already mentioned using Retrospect running on a Mac to back
up a Windows machine. Currently I do the opposite: I run Retrospect on
Windows XP to back up two Macs, as well as two Windows boxes. (The choice
was purely a matter of running Retrospect on the machine with the faster
CPU and with the DVD writer.) Performance is adequate on a 10Mb LAN for the
old Macs, which have 4GB disks. Performance is adequate on a 100Mb LAN for
the larger disks on the Windows systems. (I have a 10/100 switch on my LAN,
which enables the computers with 100Mb capability to communicate at the
higher speed without disadvantaging the slower ones.)

I do daily backups to the large internal HD on the Retrospect server; this
means that daily backups are not delayed by any manual intervention
requirement. For the twice-a-week backups to DVD, I do have to swap DVDs --
not good in the sense of requiring a manual step, but a lot easier than
moving a hard disk.

Edward Reid

Folks,

I was wondering if I could ask a related question about backups.

I recently came back to the Mac after a few years on "the dark side"
with a Dell Wintel machine.

My backup needs are probably more modest than those I've seen discussed
on many threads here in Tidbits Talk.

When I had my PC, I had a copy of Easy CD creator, and one of the
things it did was allow me to format a CD-RW to act like a floppy disk,
so that I could just drag files from my hard drive onto the CD-RW
whenever I wanted to save the file.

When I tried to do the same thing on my new Powerbook, I found out that
I could use disk utility to burn files to the disk, and that I could
erase the whole CD-RW and use it again, I didn't have the ability to
just copy single files to the disk.

I think I'm going to need a commercial piece of software, the Macintosh
equivalent of Easy CD creator, to give me this function. Does it exist
for the Mac at all? If so, is there a reasonably priced piece of
software I can buy to help me do this?

I'm sorry if this question has been asked and answered before, but I
searched the archive for a couple of hours before I posted this
question. Maybe I just chose the wrong search criteria.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me

Dave Gerlits

On Jan 7, 2005, at 2:27 PM, Dave Gerlits wrote:

> When I had my PC, I had a copy of Easy CD creator, and one of the
> things it did was allow me to format a CD-RW to act like a floppy disk,
> so that I could just drag files from my hard drive onto the CD-RW
> whenever I wanted to save the file.
>
> When I tried to do the same thing on my new Powerbook, I found out that
> I could use disk utility to burn files to the disk, and that I could
> erase the whole CD-RW and use it again, I didn't have the ability to
> just copy single files to the disk.

There used to be a program called DirectCD which allowed exactly this
functionality. AFAIK, it no longer exists.

Programs like Retrospect use a similar technique to incrementally write
to a disk.

You can simulate similar behavior by writing additional sessions to a
CD. These will show up as separate volumes, but it'll work pretty well.
This requires Toast or an equivalent CD writing program, it can't be
done with Apple's tools. (Though there might be a hack that I don't
know about.)

--Nik

The closest thing I've ever heard of is burnItAgainSam (shareware):
http://toolsonten.com/en/03TOOLS

You can't erase files you've already burned (you'd have to do the whole
CD), but you can burn files one at a time.

Max

--On January 9, 2005 2:09:03 PM -0800 Nik <GerberiNik.net> wrote:

> On Jan 7, 2005, at 2:27 PM, Dave Gerlits wrote:
>
>> When I had my PC, I had a copy of Easy CD creator, and one of the
>> things it did was allow me to format a CD-RW to act like a floppy disk,
>> so that I could just drag files from my hard drive onto the CD-RW
>> whenever I wanted to save the file.
>>
>
> There used to be a program called DirectCD which allowed exactly this
> functionality. AFAIK, it no longer exists.

The technology is called packet writing. Rumor has it that packet writing
will be included in Tiger.

<http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/multisessioncds.html#Anchor-The-14210>

I tried it with both Easy CD on Windows and DirectCD (both from Adaptec
before spun off as Roxio) many years ago and found it very unreliable --
after a few weeks I could no longer get files off the cd's.

Kevin

The nearest thing for the MAC to Easy CD on Windows is to use Toast 4 Deluxe, or newer, to write files to a CD formatted in ISO 9660. ISO 9660 CDs are cross-platform (including Mac, UNIX, DOS, Windows) compatible and all the files in a multi-session CD appear as a single volume. Each session in a Mac-format multi-session CD appears as a separate volume.

Toast and ISO 9660 CDs can be used to make incremental back-ups so that only changed files are written in each back-up session. Care must be taken from session to session to maintain the original folder names and structure of the backed-up disc because Toast will interpret any changed folders as new folders and will back up the entire contents of the changed folders. The instructions for making ISO 9660 incremental back-ups are in the Toast manual.

Limitations of this approach are that: hidden files don't get backed-up; and, when a CD becomes full, one has to start again and "manually" divide the files to be backed up among different CDs. What I do is divide up the hard disc folders among a number of CDs at the outset so that each CD is no more than partially full to begin with. How much room to leave depends on how much one expects the contents of a particular folder to change over time. It may be useful to back up to CD-RW discs that can be re-used.

An advantage of this approach is that files can simply be copied back to the hard drive as needed. I also use this approach for archiving software installers because an installer can be run from the archive CD.

For diversity, I also use Retrospect Express to back-up to CDs or to an external hard drive. The advantage of this approach is that one just keeps adding CDs as the size of the back-up increases. Hidden files are backed up. Retrospect keeps track of everything in a separate catalogue if CDs are used, or with the back-up file, if the back-up is to a Mac file on another hard disc. In practice I frequently back-up my ever-changing documents folder with Retrospect to CD-R and to an external hard disc. That way I always have an uneraseable back-up available. Many's the time I've gone searching through ancient back-up discs for some file I thought I'd never have to use again. Other folders, including the system folder, I back up less frequently with Toast to ISO 9660 CD-RW discs and, with Retrospect, to CD-R.