Configuring optical drive destination options

 

When using an optical drive as your backup destination, the backup works by firstly backing up your data to a compressed Windows Backup Utility file (.bkf format) to some form of disk-based storage device (local hard drive, network drive, removable hard drive, etc). The compressed .bkf file is then burnt directly to writable media in your optical drive.

There are a number of destination settings which can be configured for Optical drives. To access these destination settings:

  1. Click Jobs in the navigation bar
  2. Select the job to be edited and click Edit at the bottom of the window.
  3. Click Destination on the left menu.

Burner drive options
Specify the optical drive to be used for backup as well as other settings such as the burn speed, media eject, and verify.

Backup file naming
Specify how backup files should be named when written to writable media and any variables you wish to include in the filename (job name, date, computer name, etc).

Keep local copies of your backups
Mandatory: a temporary disk location (local hard drive, network drive, etc) where the backup file is stored before being burnt directly to your writable media needs to be specified. A default location is set when the job is first created but this can be changed. This secondary copy of your backup is also useful for redundancy and quick restore of data. You can additionally determine how this temporary space is managed and how many backup files should be stored here.

Media checking
Specify how BackupAssist should handle unrecognized or unprepared writable media or if the wrong media is inserted (eg. Tuesday's disc is inserted on a Wednesday). These settings will determine what action BackupAssist should take (ie. backup and warn the user of incorrect media or not backup at all).