Archive to CD
Doing off-site backups isn't just a good idea, it's vital to your future, but it can become cumbersome when the volume of data gets large. Rather than constantly upgrading the storage on your server(s) and correspondingly upgrading your backup solution to handle the now larger volume of material to backup, we recommend doing a periodic Archive to CD which will then still be available to the network through a CD drive, but won't need to be backed up to tape or removable drive.

We offer this service to our clients for a flat fee of $250 for which you'll get two copies of each CD to be burned plus a third copy that we'll retain in our library. The two copies that you receive are (1. for use on your network and a second to go home with the Off-Site backup person. The one that we retain is to use as a master to burn another in case of a disaster.

Here's the procedure:
Find a workstation with a couple of Gigs of free space and make a subdirectory called "CD_Burn1" into which you copy the files you want to Archive from the server(s). While doing the copying, ensure that you rename any file names or subdirectories with spaces in them to replace the space with underscore (ie: "Program Files" becomes "Program_Files").

Check the status on the subdirectory periodically to ensure it doesn't go over 550MB in total volume. Once you've either run out of files you want to archive or reached the 550MB limit it's time to make your future self an index. Pop open a DOS prompt.

cd \CD_Burn1 <enter> "change directories into the root of the CD-Rom"

DIR *.* /S > README.CD "DIRectory of all files including subdirectories redirected to the file ReadMe.CD"

Now, do your "future self" a big favor and open readme.cd with a TEXT editor (not a word processor) and make some notes next to the file list as to what each file is. Just humor me on this for now, you'll be glad you did down the road.

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