12014 Tape Drive & Span Support in Enhanced Windows Backup Author: Products: URL: /Support_Kb.aspx?kbname=ewbackup-tape-drive-span-support Created: 01-Oct-2005 Last updated: 13-Oct-2006
Enhanced Windows Backup was primarily designed to support "backup to disk". It is our belief that the price of hard disks has now fallen to the point that it represents the most cost effecive backup media. When compared to tape, disk is: more reliable; faster; random access (quicker restores). With modern external enclosures and the advent of USB2 and Firewire interfaces, it is also a very portable media and easy to take off-site. Having said all of that, Enhanced Windows Backup offers advantages over plan Windows Backup when using tape or DVD backup media, even if backups need to span multiple media. If you understand that Enhanced Windows Backup is simply a wrapper for NTBackup then you can use it to achieve anything that you can with NTBackup itself but with the advantages of advanced scheduling, automatic handling of multiple jobs etc. If you need specific media support commands, you can add these to the job in the parameter string that can be manually setup within the job editor. Click here for information about additional command line parameters for NTBackup that can be added to the parameter string. NB. Please check the Microsoft documentation about NTBackup to ensure that it can support you CD or DVD writer. There are issues with writing directly from NTBackup (and therefore EWBACKUP) to optical media. You can of course backup to hard disk and then use your favourite CD/DVD burning package to copy the backup files to optical media.
Enhanced Windows Backup was primarily designed to support "backup to disk". It is our belief that the price of hard disks has now fallen to the point that it represents the most cost effecive backup media. When compared to tape, disk is: more reliable; faster; random access (quicker restores). With modern external enclosures and the advent of USB2 and Firewire interfaces, it is also a very portable media and easy to take off-site.
Having said all of that, Enhanced Windows Backup offers advantages over plan Windows Backup when using tape or DVD backup media, even if backups need to span multiple media. If you understand that Enhanced Windows Backup is simply a wrapper for NTBackup then you can use it to achieve anything that you can with NTBackup itself but with the advantages of advanced scheduling, automatic handling of multiple jobs etc. If you need specific media support commands, you can add these to the job in the parameter string that can be manually setup within the job editor. Click here for information about additional command line parameters for NTBackup that can be added to the parameter string.
NB. Please check the Microsoft documentation about NTBackup to ensure that it can support you CD or DVD writer. There are issues with writing directly from NTBackup (and therefore EWBACKUP) to optical media. You can of course backup to hard disk and then use your favourite CD/DVD burning package to copy the backup files to optical media.
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