www.aiscl.co.uk

Hi. I have been enjoying AISBackup for several years now. My current scenario is that I have a nightly backup that backs up all of my family's data to another machine on my LAN. This should protect against failure of the main family PC. I also have what I call the "essentials" backup which is the data I'm unprepared to lose in the event of catastrophe (i.e. house fire) - mostly digital photos.

The idea is that every Sunday night, I run the "essentials" backup. As I back up to a DVD, but before it fills up, my plan is to have 2 DVD-RWs in addition to the main DVD-R. After I back up to the DVD-R, I would make a copy of that backup onto the -RW, which I would take to work. I would bring the other -RW home on Friday night and repeat the process the next Sunday. That way, the most I should lose would be the last week's worth of data.

My questions are: 1) Is this a reasonable strategy? Does anyone else have other ideas on how ensure retention of files in the event of catastrophe? 2) Is there some way to get AIS backup to make a 2nd copy of a session onto a 2nd DVD? Thanks for your consideration.

I'm on 2.2.0.268, by the way. Thanks!

Sounds to me like a reasonable procedure for what you say you want.

Have you considered creating multiple identical backup jobs, one for each DVD? (can be created using "Base New Job On Existing Job" option). Maybe 3 backup jobs: Home DVD-R, Work DVD-RW(1) and Work DVD-RW(2). That way, if an error occured on your Home DVD-R at least you wouldn't be copying the error to your other DVDs. This would however require you to update 3 backup jobs every time you make changes such as modifying files and folders.

And of course, if you thought it necessary you could swap DVDs at work each day and run the relevant backup job each night, so that the biggest loss of data would be back to the last working day. I tend not to take offsite backups every n days. I prefer to take them after I've made changes that I wouldn't like to lose, so could be as frequently as every day or as little as every month depending on the backup job type and the work I've done since the last backup.

Thanks for the posting, it's made me think twice about my own procedures and given me some ideas to improve them.

Hope this helps,

Ian