By M. David Stone
You say you’ve had enough disasters with lost files to appreciate the importance of backing up? And you’re responsible for your own system, so you don’t have a network administrator to do the work for you? So now that you’re using Windows 95 have you tried backing up lately?
Well, if you’ve tried backing up in Windows 95, and you’ve used the same tape drive and software you’ve always used in Windows, one of two things has almost certainly happened. I guarantee it.
One possibility is that long filenames and device driver issues have kept the backup from working at all. But if that’s your problem, you should count yourself lucky. The other possibility is that everything seemed to work, but didn’t. So here you are, walking around with a false sense of security. If disaster strikes, you may find out -- way too late -- that your backup software didn’t back up long filenames and the Windows 95 registry files properly. How’s that for a nightmare?
Of course, by now some manufacturers are starting to ship Windows 95 versions of their software. One that I can vouch for, because I’ve actually seen it in operation, is Colorado Backup for Windows 95, which Hewlett-Packard offers for its SureStore DAT tape drives and Colorado Memory System minicartridge drives. Others will certainly ship soon. And that solves the problem. Or maybe not.
Is It Soup Yet?
Even software that’s designed to work in Windows 95 has some important shortcomings. Like fr’instance: If you’re used to DOS or Windows backup packages, you would expect that if you lost your hard disk, you would be able to simply replace it, restore the files from your tape drive, and pick up where you left off -- or at least pick up from wherever you were the last time you backed up.
That’s called disaster recovery, and that’s part of what backups are supposed to do for you. Windows 95 tape backups don’t do that. Not yet.
The first wave of Windows 95 tape backup packages typically (Read: For every program I’ve seen or heard of so far) require that if you have a disaster, you have to restore by first reinstalling Windows 95, then installing the control program for the tape drive, and then running the restore operation. Yuk. Various vendors swear they’re working on utilities to let you boot up off a floppy disk and simply run a restore program, just the way you’d like to. But even if the utilities were already available, you might want to stay away from tape backups anyway.
The real problem with tape drives is that they often turn out to be write-only devices -- particularly with inexpensive formats that don’t verify on the same pass as the writing pass. Since the verification takes so gawdawful long -- essentially doubling the time for backup -- there’s a strong tendency to skip the verification step. (If you have a minicartridge tape drive, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about.) But when disaster strikes, it’s a little late to find out that you can’t read the data on the tape.
Another problem with tape drives is that you have to run the backup program to get your backups. Yes, there are packages with automated backups that you can set to run at a given hour every day. But in the real world, unless you probably work at unpredictable hours, you may want to turn your computer off overnight, which means it can’t backup when you’re not there anyway. And yes, there are packages that backup in the background as you continue to work, but these have their own problems.
If you work like I do, there’s a good chance you’ll reboot your system at least a couple of times each day, either because you have a dual boot machine, with one or more programs that won’t work in Windows 95, or because of system crashes. And rebooting in the middle of a backup is not the best way to guarantee that the data is backed up properly. (This is called understatement.) Besides, background operations affect performance. And I’ve yet to see a machine that works fast enough to spare the extra ticks. (It’s awfully easy to get spoiled, no matter how fast a system you have.)
So what's the best way to backup? Forget tape.
Why Tape?
The benefit of tape -- cheap backup -- isn’t as compelling as it once was. When hard disks were struggling to hit $1 per MB, and minicartridge tapes were a bit below $.20 per MB, there was a big difference in money saved. But today’s hard disk prices are hitting $.20 per MB, and even lower. And unless you go to one of the more expensive tape choices -- like DAT -- tape is in the 1 to 10 cent range. That’s still a noticeable difference, but not as compelling a difference, particularly when you add in the cost of the drive itself.
You can get better savings per megabyte with, say, a DAT drive. But to get the 1 to 5 tenths of a cent per megabyte price for DAT drives, you have to pay big bucks for the drive. And that means you have to use a lot of tape before the overall price per MB of drive plus tape falls low enough to justify the more expensive drives.
With prices like this, there’s less and less reason to use tape.
With hard disks -- or removable disk formats for that matter, like 3.5-inch MO drives -- you get faster performance for backups and restores, along with the benefits of random access. That means faster restoring of individual files or groups of files and easier restoring, since you can use standard copy commands to copy the files back to your primary hard disk. It also means that if your hard disk dies, you don’t have to wait for a replacement. You can simply run your programs and load your data from the backup. When the replacement hard disk arrives, you can use XCOPY to copy everything from the backup to the new hard disk.
Strategies for Backup Disks
If you like the idea of using random access disks for backup, you have a choice between using a hard disk or a removable cartridge disk. The advantages for the hard disk are speed and price. The advantages for a removable cartridge disk are that you can store multiple generations of backups on multiple disks, and you can use the drive for other purposes too -- like archiving or near-line storage.
One warning about removable cartridge disks: Don’t consider any format with less capacity than a 230 MB 3.5-inch MO drive. Lower capacity drives -- like the Iomega Zip or SyQuest EZ 135 are basically new and improved floppy disks. And it takes too many of them to back up a 500 MB or higher-capacity hard disk.
Here’s something else to keep in mind: If you don’t quite trust disk compression programs for your working hard disk, you might still consider one for your backup disk. If you use a hard disk for backup, you can match your primary hard disk’s capacity by getting half the capacity for the backup disk (or a little more to play it safe), and taking advantage of compression.
If you’re already using compression on your hard disk, or don’t trust it at all, you need the same capacity for the backup hard disk as for the primary hard disk. The same strategy works for removable cartridges, letting you use a 270 MB SyQuest disk or a 230 MB Iomega Bernoulli disk to backup a 500MB hard disk. (Well, almost. Assuming you have some empty space on it.)
You might also want to consider partitioning your hard disk into, say, 250MB sections. That will keep cluster size down, so you can fit more small files on the hard disk. It will also let you copy a full partition onto a single 250MB cartridge. If you get a large capacity removable drive, like Iomega’s promised 1 GB Jaz drive, you may not need to partition the hard disk to fit each part neatly on a cartridge, but you may still want to partition it to keep cluster size down.
On the 1 GB drive on my system, for example, I keep system files (DOS, Windows, and utilities) on drive C, data on drive E, (D is my hard disk for backups) most applications on drive F, and communications programs and email on drive G. Dividing the hard disk this way makes it easy to back up the different drives. Follow me through (as flying instructors say):
Since I’m mostly concerned with backing up from drive E, I’ve set up a batch file to incrementally backup drive E, using the XCOPY command to copy modified files. But since I’m also concerned with critical INI and option files on C and F, I’ve also included lines in the batch file to copy modified INI and option files to drive E before backing up E to drive D. (If you followed that, you’re home free. It gets easier now.)
Since I spend most of my time in Word (well, what do you expect from a writer), I run the batch file with a Word macro. I can run the macro at any time, but I have it defined as an Autoexit macro, so it automatically runs when I leave Word.
Did somebody ask what I do with the other drives?
Well, since C (my system files) and F (my applications) rarely change -- except for the INI and option files that I take care of with the batch file -- I rarely need to back them up. The only time I bother is when I install a new program, and then I do it manually. I also back up my G drive manually, but only once every week or so. Any email that’s important enough to worry about losing either gets printed or copied to drive E.
Of course, your needs may differ. In that case, if the backup disk matches your primary disk in capacity, you may want to write a batch file that copies all modified files on all drives to the backup disk. But unless you’re a lot more patient than I am, you won’t want to run the full backup every time you leave your favorite program. A good compromise may be to backup your data disk incrementally each time you leave, say, Word, and then run the incremental backup for the entire drive once at the end of the day.
Not so incidentally, if you’re using a removable disk for backup, and you need more than one removable disk to back up your entire hard drive, you’ll want to write a separate batch file for each drive on the hard disk. You can then change to the right backup disks before running each batch file. (This is not rocket science.)
Making It Work
So much for the theory. Now on to the details.
The first thing you have to do, when you first install the backup hard disk or removable disk, is put a system on the disk. With hard disks and removable drives that don’t need special formatting you can format the disk and put a system on it at the same time. Open the My Computer window in Windows 95, select the drive you want to format, and choose File Format. Choose Full for the Format type, and make sure you’ve checked the Copy System Files check box to put a system on the drive.
If the drive is already formatted, you can put a system on the disk by following the same procedure, but choosing Copy System Files Only for the Format Type.
Next, back up your entire hard disk. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll assume that you haven’t broken up your primary hard disk into multiple drives, and that you can fit everything on one backup disk. Choose Start, Shut Down, then Restart the computer in MS-DOS mode. From DOS mode enter the command:
XCOPY C:*.* D: /E/C/H/R/K
The trick to making this work is adding all those switches at the end of the command. The /E tells XCOPY to copy all subdirectories, including empty ones. The /C tells it to continue copying even after an error. The /H tells it to copy hidden and system files. The /R tells it to overwrite read-only files (which shouldn’t be necessary if you’ve just formatted the backup disk, but I threw it in to play safe). The /K tells it to copy attributes as well. The result is that you should end up with an exact copy of your hard disk.
The next step is a bit of a pain. You have to run the XCOPY again, adding the /M switch to the brew. The /M tells XCOPY to copy only those files with the archive bit set to on, and then set the archive bit to off. The effect is to copy only those files that have been modified since the last time they were copied with a /M. It’s important for the full backup not to use the /M, to make sure you copied all files. But you have to copy them the second time with the /M to set the archive bit to off on all the files on your disk.
Once you’ve backed up your disk, you can create the batch files you’ll need. Use your favorite text editor or word processor, and be sure to save the file as ASCII text. (In Word, you would save it as Text Only.) For simplicity’s sake, once again, I’ll assume that all your data files are in subdirectories ... uh ... folders under the Data direc ... uh ... folder. (Let’s see; they’re directories when you’re in DOS mode or a DOS window, but folders when you’re not. Let’s call them directories.)
The batch file for the incremental data backup should look something like this:
XCOPY C:\DATA\*.* D:\DATA /M/E/C/H/R/K
Call it DATABACK.BAT, and put it in, say, the C:\BATFILES directory.
The batch file for the incremental backup of the entire disk should look like this:
XCOPY C:*.* D: /M/E/C/H/R/K
Call it DISKBACK.BAT, and put it in the C:\BATFILES directory too.
In the DATABACK.BAT, you’re copying files from the data directory and all subdirectories on C to the data directory and subdirectories on D. In DISKBACK.BAT, you’re copying files from anywhere on drive C to the appropriate directory on drive D. And notice that with the /M switch, you’ll copy only those files that have changed since the last time you copied with the /M switch.
You can run either of these batch files any time you like, from a DOS window (open the window, change to the Batfiles directory, type the filename at the command line, and hit enter), or from, say, Explorer (go to the Batfiles folder, and either double click on the filename or select it and hit enter). But you’ll find it more convenient to run the files from Windows 95 if you set them to close the DOS window when they’re done.
To set a batch file to close the DOS window, open Explorer, go to the Batfiles folder, and right click on the filename. Then choose Properties, go to the Program tabbed card, add a check to the Close On Exit check box, and choose OK.
The final touch for our purposes is to run DATABACK.BAT automatically whenever you leave Word. To create the macro, open Word, choose Tools Macro, enter the name Autoexit in the Macro Name text box, and choose Create. Then enter a single command between the Sub MAIN and End Sub Statements:
Shell Environ$("COMSPEC") + " /C C:\BATFILES\DATABACK.BAT"
(assuming, of course, that the file DATABACK.BAT is in the Batfiles directory on drive C).
Choose File Close, and answer Yes when Word asks if you want to keep the changes, then choose File Save All to save the new macro to disk (as part of a change in Normal.dot). And that’s it. From now on, whenever you close Word, the Autoexit macro will run the batch file to backup any new or modified data files. And you should be able to sleep just a little more soundly at night.
M. David Stone is a writer and occasional computer consultant. His latest book is The Underground Guide to Color Printers, published by Addison-Wesley, and slated to be available in February, 1996.
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