Friday, January 30, 2015

Some Backup Scripts

I've been updating my backup procedure for Windows and learned some new tricks to share. My current backup procedure is the most horrible thing I could imagine. It copies and compresses all the files I care about and stores them on a NAS. It ignores some critical backup components:
  • Waste space, no incremental just a full copy of everything. This takes up a lot of space.
  • No daily archive. What if I want to recover a file I deleted 17 days ago from a networked directory? As of right now it cannot be done.
  • Compression sucks, for three reasons. 
    • First, it takes longer to do the backup.
    • Second, it is harder to search through.
    • Third, if the single massive zip file is corrupt the backup is useless.
These are some serious issues I should deal with in my new solution. In addition to that I don't want to give up the power, flexibility, and--let's just go with--geek pride a scripted solution provides. Geek pride could be replaced with frugal, but to be honest some of this stuff is a little fun to figure out. Saving a dollar is a by product more than a motivator.