Backing up my hard drive (any suggestions on backup utilities?)
 

Hi, am currently using Windows XP, but will soon be reformating and having a dual-boot of Windows and Linux. Basically, I need to backup several large directories (larger than DVD size large) in XP onto DVDs and then be able to restore parts of the archived directories in both OS's. Anyone know of any (hopefully free or at least very cheap) utilities that could simplify the process? (I guess I could probably write up something in Java if there isn't anything up to the task yet, but I don't want to go to the trouble unless I have to.:D)

Do you mean just burn the DVDs? They can be read by both linux and windows

what do you mean?

If you mean have a type of rolling backup system, the I suggest making a seperate FAT32 partition on your hard drive and rsync the directories you want to that partition. You can use rsync in windows and linux. It rocks!

hamish

Hell, or you can enter my competition to win free offsite backup :)

h

Mainly I just need something to separate the data into chunks that will fit on DVDs and then can restore parts of the data (not all of it at once) on both Linux and Windows. The functionality I'm looking for is similar to spanning Zip archivers, which will work if you know of any that output one volume at a time (I don't have room to store all the volumes on my hard drive at once, so I have to make one at a time, burn it, delete it, and make the next one) and run under Windows and Linux (or WINE if there isn't a port for Linux). Compression might be nice, but isn't necessary, I just need something that can preserve the relative directory structure the way it is.

WinRAR maybe?

Something like this should work. I'm turning in for tonight, but I will check and see if it will run under WINE tomorrow (unless someone here knows off the top of their head whether or not it does).

Well, I was too curious, so I tried it tonight and it seems to work decently - haven't tried it on any real backups yet, but the program itself was running, so I think that will probably work. Thanks anyway.:)