This is interesting - Back Up

time to read 3 min | 478 words

Check out this site, automated backup to a hardware solution with versioning
From what they are saying in their site it sounds suspicously like some sort of linux + cvs / subversion on the server and a client that simply watch directories for changes.
I would really like one of those, but the price a bit prohibitive.
I just bought a DVD burner so I could do back up (recently managed to burn my mother-board) my stuff.
I'll just wait until I've ruined my computer again and find out that I forgot to back up recently / forgot to back up the really imprtant stuff.

In other news, at work there is this super important excel file that contain about 90% of the stuff that we do {there is an internal application to replace excel, but it's not working on the computer we have, it's too old (and the application was written with VB5/6)}.
I managed to completely screw up the file and all its data.
I was facing enterring all this info manually again (about five hours, with a lot of cross referencing to printed files, and checking, and totally taking us down).
Five minutes after I started this I remembered that yesterday I'd copied this file to my disk-on-key.
I checked, and there it was, and it only took me another five minutes to restore it to the way it's supposed to be.

Seeing that, and lacking any backup software/internet access/programatic access, I decided to bite the bullet and attemted to write a shell script to copy the file every day to a backup directory (because I'm more concerned with people like me ruining the file than some distater or malicious intent).
I spent about three hours on a default install of win2K trying to find a way to get a datetime base file name so I could do something like:

copy really_important_file.xls "\buckups\"+datetime.replace("\",".")+".xls"

Couldn't find it, I know squat about the shell, so that didn't help either.

Finally I used Excel's Macro editor to search FileSystemObject and had this script save as backup.vbs

Dim fs, filename
Set fs = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
filename = "c:\backups\" + Replace(FormatDateTime(Date, vbshordate), "/", ".")+ "-" + Replace(FormatDateTime(Time, vbShortTime), "/", ".") + ".xls"
fs.CopyFile "really_important_file.xls", filename

Then doing:
at 21:00 /every:M,T,W,Th,F,S,Su "backup.vbs"

And you got a very poor man backup.