gthorn
21st of February 2003 (Fri), 01:55
I'm not sure how everyone else does it, but I arrange my photos on my hard disk in folder trees (i.e. D:\Photos\Holidays\2002 Nov ; D:\Photos\Holidays\2003 Jan etc).
My photos collection is now over 12GB and so I needed a utility to be able to backup the collection to multiple CDRW's and still maintain the folder tree structrure on the CDRW's so that if I need to restore, its then just a matter of copying the CDRW's back to the hard disk.
I had a look at a number of backup programs and they aren't suited that well, because they typically compress the backups into a special file which can't be read again without the backup program itself. Also, the whole backup needs to be completed in one session which can take a day or two to complete.
So, I wrote a program called CopyCat which has the following features:
1. Writes to UDF formatted CDRW's. Spans multiple disks if required. Can't use normal CDR format because it needs to be able to add one file at time in the case of incremental backups and CDR doesn't support that.
2. UDF format supports the normal file system while CDR uses the Joliet system which has restrictions in filename lengths. For photos this may not be a problem, but for MP3 music (which the program also does well) this can be a problem.
2. Maintains a copylist of all files copied and where they were copied to.
3. Copying can be interrupted at any time and later resumed from where it left off.
4. Incremental and differential copying.
5. Preserves the exact folder tree structure of the source files on the target disk(s)
6. Copylist viewer allows one to locate copied files on the target disks.
7. When copying to CDRW's, a copy of the copylist is added to each disk. This enables the copying process to be resumed from the last known good copylist in the event of a system crash during the copying. (My photos take 1 day and my music collection takes 5 days to backup, so this is important.)
8. Because the files on target disks are normal files, I can use ThumbsPlus to catalogue the disks so I can easily find my pictures.
9. Simple interface (hopefully !)
The program is available free to anyone for personal use and if anyone would like to try it out, it can be downloaded from www.muzicman.com/code/cc_install.exe
Graham Horn
My photos collection is now over 12GB and so I needed a utility to be able to backup the collection to multiple CDRW's and still maintain the folder tree structrure on the CDRW's so that if I need to restore, its then just a matter of copying the CDRW's back to the hard disk.
I had a look at a number of backup programs and they aren't suited that well, because they typically compress the backups into a special file which can't be read again without the backup program itself. Also, the whole backup needs to be completed in one session which can take a day or two to complete.
So, I wrote a program called CopyCat which has the following features:
1. Writes to UDF formatted CDRW's. Spans multiple disks if required. Can't use normal CDR format because it needs to be able to add one file at time in the case of incremental backups and CDR doesn't support that.
2. UDF format supports the normal file system while CDR uses the Joliet system which has restrictions in filename lengths. For photos this may not be a problem, but for MP3 music (which the program also does well) this can be a problem.
2. Maintains a copylist of all files copied and where they were copied to.
3. Copying can be interrupted at any time and later resumed from where it left off.
4. Incremental and differential copying.
5. Preserves the exact folder tree structure of the source files on the target disk(s)
6. Copylist viewer allows one to locate copied files on the target disks.
7. When copying to CDRW's, a copy of the copylist is added to each disk. This enables the copying process to be resumed from the last known good copylist in the event of a system crash during the copying. (My photos take 1 day and my music collection takes 5 days to backup, so this is important.)
8. Because the files on target disks are normal files, I can use ThumbsPlus to catalogue the disks so I can easily find my pictures.
9. Simple interface (hopefully !)
The program is available free to anyone for personal use and if anyone would like to try it out, it can be downloaded from www.muzicman.com/code/cc_install.exe
Graham Horn