Backup strategies for OS3.x and 4.x?

[mousehouse]

Up until recently my backup strategy was to do

"lha -r add dh0:backup__ #?"

on my two running Amiga's. However, when I recently needed to restore a disk the LHA archive was corrupt. I must have hit some bug or incompatibility there. Luckily I did not loose any user data, but it took me some weeks to get a new install up and running that somehow resembles my old one.

After compressing my drive's files I upload the resulting archive to a network host or put it on an USB stick. What failure hits, I boot using the "NetworkBootDisk", format the drive, fetch the file, unarchive it, and voila!

Besides LHA I have also experimented using 'zip' version 2.2 but found that the resulting zip archives are not always readable, there seem to be different versions of zip around that are not compatible... eg. the WarpOS version of zip creates archives that cannot be expanded using the 68k version... which kind of defeats the purpose.

Another shortcoming to me is the ability to easily exclude directories or files. I have not succeeded in telling LHA to exclude a directory... should be possible using '-W' but I'm clueless :hammer:

Also tried AnArchiver which sometime crashes on me (well, technically LHA bails on some files). Nice GUI though.

Anyway,

What backup strategies do fellow users have?

[danwood]

On OS3 Amiback tools worked great for me in the 90s, not sure how it'd cope in the 00s with gigs of storage though.

On OS4, just drag to DVDs seems to be the only solution.

[zipper]

OS 3; to another hard drive with identical partitions. Copy all clone quiet. No compressing as enough space available and speed reasons, too.

[mfilos]

I never liked incremental backups on the Amiga simply because the data isn't that big comparing it to a PC full of software and games, making it rather easy to fully backup it up.
Especially when the System partition along with almost every useful program most of times don't go beyond 500MB.
If you just keep a System partition with only the system and patches etc, then a lot smaller backup is needed.

I always used:

1> dh0:
1> lha a -aezrx DH1:System_Backup.lha #?

(for compressing the data although it takes more time just replace the "z" with "Z")

[Thorham]

I usually burn everything straight to CD. Would be nice if I had a good ISO image maker for DVDs, or a file system that candle writing to virtual CD/DVD images.

[Templario]

I in OS4 clone the hard disk from my Sam to other external hard disk identical, well this hard disk was the previous hard disk, with partitions and all.

[Duce]

My SAM 440 I just have a quick and dirty script that runs via a crontab event every 48 hours.

Copies the entire contents of the 32 GB (SYS: is 10 GB, BBS: is 20 GB roughly) SATA SSD to a SAMBA share on a Windows 2003 server box.

While I'd like to patch together an incremental solution to this, the way I have it now takes no time at all, but an incremental way to do it would keep the IO and network traffic down.

[Xanxi]

I copy my whole system partition as is (no lha or lzx) on an USB stick. This is fast with a Deneb, much slower with a Subway.

[Tenacious]

OS 3; to another hard drive with identical partitions. Copy all clone quiet. No compressing as enough space available and speed reasons, too.

I lean this direction, though, backing to CD as well, helps me sleep better.  

[Daedalus]

I have a 2nd internal hard drive in both of my "main" Amigas, and regularly run Deniil's Backup program to copy over any files which have a newer date stamp. Simple, no compression and no messing around with large archives. Every so often I then do the same to a networked drive, and once in a while then I'll burn the important data (coding stuff mainly) to DVDs to be kept elsewhere. The files are relatively small and few, and storage is so cheap nowadays that I just don't see the need for compressing data.

[mousehouse]

Thanks for all the replies. I'm not too fond of copying to another partition as this does not protect me from killing the drive (yup, done that). With a straight copy to an external device, does that take into account the file permissions and lowercase / uppercase of the filenames? Also, incremental does not really seem necessary as my main HD is around 260M, I can live with full LHA archives.

Can you somehow create a HDF / hard disk file, mount that as being a real drive and copy/clone to it?