CD-R/CD-RW backup utilities roundup

Emedia Professional, Jan, 1998 by Robert A. Starrett

We've all learned by rote the most oft-repeated admonition in all of computing: Back up your hard drive regularly, because if it hasn't crashed yet, it surely will. Sound advice to be sure, but does the premise still hold true? Does a tragic hard drive crash loom in every user's future?

Not necessarily. Today's hard drives are more reliable than ever and many users will replace a good hard drive with a larger and faster one long before the original gets used enough to see its Mean Time Between Failures time come up.

But hard drive "crashes" are not the only type of misfortunes that befall hard drives, and not the only disasters that good backup tools and a good backup strategy can prevent. We usually think of a hard drive crash as the hard drive heads hitting the platter. This is indeed a physical collision and likely inspired the term "crash". But a lot of other things can happen to your hard drive besides a head-on head-and-platter collision.

For example, some programs caution users to back up their hard drive before installing them. This is good advice, and should be taken to heart with programs such as disk compression utilities, system boot managers, real-time interleaving programs, and new operating systems. Shareware that purports to do amazing things with your hard drive should be approached with caution because, despite the best of intentions, single programmers and small shops just don't have the resources to test their programs on the vast variety on computer configurations existing in the world today.

Even programs from "big name" companies have been known to make logical mincemeat out of an otherwise physically stable hard drive.

And then there's the ever-present threat of viruses, the worst of which erase or re-format your entire hard drive, but users can also prove their own hard drives' worst enemy. Despite due caution and care, and appropriate attention to your important files, one distraction or misstep, especially when using hard drive utilities like FDISK and FORMAT can cause the same feelings of stupidity and horror as a virtual mugging by a virus. So crash or no crash, virus or no virus, boneheaded maneuver or none, one way or another, computer users must count expected data loss alongside death and taxes among life's grim inevitabilities.

But, if you can't defeat fate, you can certainly fight it, and many popular and widely installed storage devices, such as CD-R, CD-RW, PD, MO, and tape drives are well-suited for girding users against the ill-effects of hard drive ailments as handy backup devices. And on the tape side, users enjoy a wide range of choice for backup software utilities to meet most straightforward or more sophisticated backup needs.

Until recently, however, the CD-R/CD-RW-centric among us have had little in the way of useful utilities to perform the backup chore on our favorite medium. The advent of packet-capable recorders, which--using appropriate software--can appear to users and function much like external hard drives has made CD-R a much safer and simpler bet for backup applications, but today, CD-R backup software products remain few and far between. The cupboard is particularly bare on the PC side, with Seagate Software's powerful and versatile Backup Exec still the only horse in the running. With a little clever maneuvering, however, users can combine some non-CD-R/CD-RW backup tools with packet-writing software like Adaptec's Direct CD and use their CD-R and CD-RW drives for backup exactly as they would use the other devices for which those backup tools are made. The backup scene on the Macintosh is somewhat more crowded, with entries from Dantz, Optima, and Charismac filling out a well-rounded field with a good functionality range.

BACKUP BASICS: WHAT IT MEANS AND WHAT'S BEEN MISSING

There is more to backing up a hard drive than just using Windows 95's XCOPY32 file-copying utility with lots of parameters to move your files from one medium to another for safety. Anyone who has tried to swap a hard drive under Windows 95 knows that there are a lot of files and essentials like the system registry that need special attention in order to position themselves on the new drive in the same place and condition as they were on the old drive. And anyone trying to restore a corrupted hard drive from an XCOPY'd piece of media or from a CD-R disc recorded with a premastering program knows that the procedure will require some additional hours to reinstall Windows after the "restored" drive fails to boot or run properly.

A good backup program can move all these files with ease. And a good backup routine should also be part of your weekly and daily maintenance rituals, even if you are not contemplating a hard drive swap. A feeling of safety and security comes with knowing that all of your important data, indeed, your whole system configuration and operating system reside safely on something other than your easily flustered hard drive.

Mainstream CD-R software vendors have achieved little success to date in addressing the nuances of the backup process. For whatever reason, the CD-R backup tools sold as ancillary products in premastering-dominated CD-R lines haven't been much good; some valiant efforts have been made, but the companies who have made them don't specialize in backup software and have ignored essential aspects of it. Backups are more than a drag-and-drop of all your files on Drive C to an ISO image.