October 4, 2005
After Rob had a hard drive (Maxtor, the same type I have in my computer) go belly-up with significant dataloss, I decided it was time to give backups a closer look.
My DVD burner came with the Nero suite of programs. I started BackItUp, selected my directories and files, and turned it loose. After it formatted the disc the program stopped updating the UI. Thinking the program was wedged I stopped the burn and ejected the DVD.
That's when I saw the burn was partially completed after all. For whatever reason (I'm guessing good, old-fashioned idiocy) they don't bother to tell you that the burn is actually succeeding. Given that it takes about 75 minutes for the burn to finish, that makes a pretty long amount of time that you have to wait to see if you're creating a backup instead of a coaster.
Of course, after I realized that I was going to get no love from the computer on this one I left the burn to run overnight. Any time I'd get up for a drink of water I'd change the disc. Then I got to disc 7 (out of a possible 9, if there wasn't enough compression). In the middle of compressing the files it told me that the compression had failed, and burned what it had to disc.
I then set up the incremental backup job that I want to run every week and hoped that it would catch any files that it missed before. Given how quickly it tore through the process, I'm guessing it didn't. And now I'm not sure whether it'll do multi-session or not -- the discs are DVD+RW but since Nero didn't tell me how it was creating the disc and didn't give me an option to select the burn style I won't know whether I created an empty, useless disc until the job runs next week.
As I said before, if I can't use or understand your convoluted UI, you have truly failed. And Nero has failed.
