VCM4: Making easier the backup process
Making easier the backup process
by VirusBuster
In all the years I have been collecting I saw many collectors fucked because something wrong happened to their collections and they did not have a recent backup or even just a backup.
Why so many collectors don't make backups regulary if actually anyone has a CD or even a DVD burner?
Lazyness!
What does produce the lazyness to backup the virus collection?
In most cases the way the collection is stored.
Most collectors have their collections unpacked this means that making a backup is a pain in the ass and takes more CDs or DVDs than being packed.
What are the beneffits of having the collection unpacked? Actually none.
Years ago, scanning inside archives used to be a slow process but with actual processors and Win32 scanners the speed scanning unpacked files compared to archives is similar.
With actual virus sorting tools, packing a request from a collection being packed is easy.
If the big enemy of collectors is not having a recent backup in order to restore the collection after a crash, our allied is the backup, and the friend of the backup is a packed collection.
Traders having their collections unpacked make a whole backup every time they make it. That's time consuming and CD/DVD consuming = space consuming.
Having the collection packed, e.g. in ZIPs, you can make incremental backups. This means you will backup only once the same file.
Imagine you have VIR001.ZIP, VIR002.ZIP, VIR003.ZIP, ..., VIR100.ZIP.
When you can fill, let's say, a DVD, you burn from VIR001 to VIR100, and those files will be burnt forever. You continue storing incoming samples in VIR111, VIR112 etc and the process is repeated when you have enough to fill other DVD.
With this system you don't need to be backuping the same files on every backup.
Other advantages of having the collection packed are:
HD does not get fragmented so easily, and defrag process will be faster.
In case of damage, restoring a packed collection is much faster.
Doing a file weeder using CRC32 as hash just takes a few seconds.
If you use this hash to file weed your collection take care to do not remove files with CRC as:
00000000
2144DF1C
because they could be not really duplicates.
