BurnAgain DVD: Burn Your Backups (Again)

Posted by Greg Healy on 08/1/07 in Giveaways, Home & Personal, Organization, Utilities

As reliable as our Apple computers are (not sure why you would be here if you are using a PC as your main computer), everyone knows that sometimes things go wrong. What would you do if those pictures you took of that Garden Gnome attacking your neighbor’s cat (don’t laugh, it could happen!) were suddenly gone? How would anyone believe you saw Big Foot if all of your video of him has been corrupted?

The best thing you can do to prevent this is to buy an external hard drive. Having a full boot-able copy of your hard drive is a safety net, and can be a life saver. Unfortunately, like your computer hard drive, there is also a chance that your external hard drive could fail. This has become a reality for me, as my hard drive is currently on it’s way to California to be repaired (hopefully with my data still salvageable). So what else can you do to protect your data? There is more than one way to skin a cat, my friend.

For those really important files; serial numbers, photos, videos etc., you can never be too safe. The way that I (and a lot of people) safe guard those extremely valuable files is by burning them to a DVD. Burning a DVD of your important files can be a hindrance, if you don’t have the right software. The software that I use to make my DVD backups a snap is BurnAgain DVD.

BurnAgain DVD does what it’s name implies. It lets you burn again. BurnAgain DVD currently supports burning to CDR, CDRW and DVDRW. I found the interface to be quite intuitive (as there are only 4 buttons in total to keep track of), though I did find I had a few problems, though I will get to those in a minute.

Files that haven't been burned yet in BurnAgain DVD

To begin your backup, up must select your files being sure that they will fit on the disc you have in your drive. Basically, all you need to do next is drag those files into BurnAgain’s window. You will get a reading of how much space has been used, and how much space is left on the disc. Now you can burn those files, or erase the disc. BurnAgain DVD really shines though, when you need to update your backup.

A disc bburning in BurnAgain DVD

If you burn a CD of all your favorite pictures, and then find that there are 5 more that you just can’t be without, is it worth burning another CD? If there is still space left on the current backed-up CD it seems like a waste right? BurnAgain lets you avoid situations like these.

To add these extra photos onto your disc, insert the disc, open BurnAgain, and go through the steps I described above. Drag the 3 photos onto the window, and click burn. Instead of wiping the disc and then writing all the information over again in addition to the photos, BurnAgain just adds the photos. This means that you no longer have to wait for another entire disc to burn, you only have to wait for the extra information to be added. BurnAgain doesn’t stop there though my friends.

A disc with changed files

BurnAgain lets you update your backups quite easily. When you re-burn your backup it will update the files that have changed, which is quite convenient. The problem I found with this is that you have to drag the photos onto the window again. This took me a while to figure out, and can be a little inconvenient. If you have files sprawled across you harddrive, it could take a while to find each file you changed, and drag it onto the window again. In the time that I have spent with BurnAgain, this didn’t bother me greatly, but the speed of my backup could be greatly improved if there was a way for the app to automatically know what files have been changed.

Files finished Burning

In the end, I found that BurnAgain DVD did a great job backing up my files. It is perfectly suited to backup smaller files, that are important and you need to keep an updated backup of. It isn’t suited for doing full backups of your drive, as you can only backup a maximum of 4.7GBs at a time (the size of a DVD). If you need to have a portable backup of a few files, BurnAgain will definitely come in handy for you, because lets face it. Carrying around a hard drive that only has 900mb of files on it is kind of silly right?

In the future, if BurnAgain DVD gets updated to BurnAgain BluRay or BurnAgain HD DVD, and Macs come standard with burners that support these media types, I think that BurnAgain could be a tool that many people could find themselves using. You can purchase BurnAgain DVD from Free Ride Coding for €17 (23.22USD).

If you have found yourself in situations where you need to keep backing up small files, then I have good news for you. Free Ride Coding has 2 licenses of BurnAgain DVD to give away. If you would like to be entered into the draw for one of these licenses, then tell me what you think is the best way to back-up your files (Online, harddrive, DVD etc.).

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aditi said on

August 1st, 2007 at 10:38 am

I definitely think the best backup solution is a combination of a harddrive and online - a hard drive usually means more space but if your computer battery bursts or something, it could be affected; online means an offsite backup.

Jacob said on

August 1st, 2007 at 11:08 am

An external backup is always the best resource for backing up your files. The chances of having your computer and external drive fail at the same time are… well… very very small… so you’re pretty safe with that setup. however, the real problem with an external hard-drive is that it doesn’t get backed up every day and when you do back it up, it can sometimes take FOREVER and possibly use up a ton of your computers memory in the meantime… ultimately its worth it, but unless you have a program like SuperDuper! (not the demo, only the real thing has this feature…) you’re stuck replacing all your files and waiting a few extra hours or skimming through and trying to decide on your own which files need to be updated (which is not fun, trust me i’ve tried…)

so really, although it is the safest way of protecting your files, it can get tedious after a while. So what’s the solution? DVD’s!!!! I’m pretty confident that the best system to save your computer is to backup all music, video, photo, and text files to dvd’s, and then use an external hard-drive to backup the rest of your computer. by getting rid of things like music and video files (which i have 45 Gigs of… pain in the butt to copy all that over and over again) you can then easily transfer the rest of your computers information without wasting hours!

XScout said on

August 1st, 2007 at 1:32 pm

What you think is the best way to back-up your files?
Actually that is a hard question, which I gave a lot of thought.
It has to be easy so that you do it regularly.
It shout be fast, say minutes not hours.
It should be reliable of course

The best protection is given by: Offsite, offline backups
This protects your data against a variety of accidents, like:
Hardware failure,
Theft
Fire

But you need
100 Mbit/s link to secure data center
Backup space in data center
Automatic tape or optical disk backup in data center

This is expensive and only affordable for pros, not for the casually Mac user.

So what’s left…
For offline backup a program like Retrospect and a pile of DVD’s
Configuring is not easy, but once set, it works like a charm. Just click on the scrit short cut you can place on your desktop to remind making backups insert last DVD and go! Automatic handsfree backup you can store in your save. Make a extra set stored elsewhere and rotate, say weekly. This is the classic set up. Lot of disapline needed and that’s why so less people do it..

And than comes time machine……

I think this tool will be great, seen the demo Steve Jobs gave in his key note?
Automatic, once set, just forget Backs up to any attached disk and that’s the trick! Cause that means felability!

USB hard drive
Firewire hard drive (faster!)
Drive attached over network! And here comes in real flexibility

You can set up a other computer as backup server a old Mac or a cheap Linux box alike and set up a raid configuration with multiple drives which is very easy to do on a Mac and easy on a Linux box if you have the experience.

Share over that network with AFP or WEBDAVE and point time machine to this drive.
And Backups are made automaticly.
Once a week backup your backup server to DVD or tape and store this offsite. Use minimum two sets of DVD’s / tape’s so there is always one complete set on the offsite location

So my ideal solution is “Time Machine” a old mac with raid as backup-server combined with a once a week offsite backup.

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Sam Ryan said on

August 1st, 2007 at 2:21 pm

My ideal solution so far is online backup of only the key files with a service like Mozy, and a hard backup of music/movies on an iPod.
Maybe a free license for BurnAgain could change my mind though, hint-hint.

Mike said on

August 1st, 2007 at 6:40 pm

I’ve always used a hard drive to back up, and remember to do it before I do anything drastic and on a regular interval, say weekly. It’s a bootable external drive, should my boot drive fail, this will boot me. I do need to figure out something in case of fire/theft. It may be as simple as getting another hard drive and leaving it at the safety deposit box…

Julian said on

August 1st, 2007 at 11:52 pm

hey i wanted to ask u guys wat is a good cheap, reliable, bootable external harddrives?
I saw one at best buy for like $130 or $169 with 500gb external power USB but i dont know if it meets any of my requirements. My requiremens are reliable, bootable, and cheap. Anyone got any ideas for me?

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Jacob said on

August 2nd, 2007 at 5:40 pm

when buying an external hard-drive, i’ve found that its usually a good idea to shop at the apple store… even though they usually over-price a lot of merchandise, they do stock their store with some amazing products…

when it comes to hard-drives, apple tends to be fairly selective on which ones they choose to sell at official apple stores. So if you walk into an apple store and buy any drive, you’ll be getting a good deal. I would, however, stay away from the hard-drives that apple manufactures. It’s not that they’re bad… but you can get better… The apple endorsed (not the right word but i hope you know what i mean..) hard-drives are all great though…

I personally chose to go with a Lacie 250GB drive… it’s only $99 and it’s very reliable… connects easily with either firewire or USB 2.0… the drive also includes additional USB ports, so if you find yourself running low on space to plug all your cameras, iPods, iPhones, printers, game controllers, etc. then it can help you solve multiple problems… and with 250GB of space, it can do more than just back up files (my laptop is only 160GB so i sometimes store my original files on my Lacie if i’m not too worried about not having multiple copies)

In short, go to your local apple store, or the online one (which provides you with links to all of the apple supported companies for external drives) if you don’t have a physical one easily accessible to you. Browse around a little bit. Anything you buy there will be of fantastic quality. (had mine for about 4 years… never even the slightest problem…)

Greg H said on

August 7th, 2007 at 11:05 pm

The winners have been notified.

DMD said on

August 10th, 2007 at 5:39 pm

It is always smart to keep 2-3 backups of everything important on your hard drive with either an external hard drive or disks. I know it is a little late to win a license, but I just wanted to add my 2 cents. If you’re really paranoid (like me), you should look into getting a safety deposit box at a bank to store your prized optical disks. I live in a state with many tornadoes throughout the year so I don’t take any chances.

Alex said on

August 22nd, 2007 at 4:21 am

Oh, I believe as soon as Handy Backup will finally release their backup for Mac Os, supporting image backup, disk spanning, etc., they’ll beat BurnAgain down I think they have the best software to backup to dvd ever, hehe.

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