[geeks] Backup software (yeah, yeah, I know)

[Sheldon T. Hall]

Since I'm living, computerwise, on a laptop without any sort of support
infrastructure, I'm having a devil of a time maintaining decent backups.

Back at home, I had a good-sized network, and a fileserver with lots of
capacity.  I had batch jobs on the Windows machines that copied all their
data directories to a server every other day, and the server was backed up
to DLT tape weekly.  Simple, almost automatic, and the resulting files could
just be copied without any special software.  The one time we had to restore
anything significant, it was a snap.

Now, all we have is a couple of Windows laptops and an external DVD burner.
It's a PITA, because the amount of data to be backed up far exceeds the
capacity of a DVD, and you have to divvy it up by hand before burning.  I
like having "real" files rather than some kind of special backup files, as
it makes restoring easier in the absence of the special software that
created the special backup files.

Back in the CP/M days, I wrote a program that backed up hard-drive data to
multiple [floppy] disks, grouping the files by size in such a way as to fill
the disks and just copying the files.  I'd love to have something like that
now.  Ideally, you'd give it a list of directories; it would then (a)
assemble the files from those directories in a way that efficiently used the
space on the DVDs, (b) make ISOs or whatever, and (c) burn the DVDs,
prompting you to load the burner, etc.

Does something like that exist?  If not, anyone want to go into the software
business?

-Shel