Incremental backups

  • Thread starter Thread starter Laurent S
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Laurent S

*** Incremental backups



Recent hard disks of 1To or more are affordable but
fallible! They have incited me to regularly make many
incremental backups as described below.

Thus I am seeking good answers to the following specific
question. Which MS Windows backup program should I
choose to frequently backup directory "XXX" to directory
"YYY"?

I want the following backup performance:

--- after the backup operation, directory "XXX" is
unchanged and "YYY" has been made to have contents
identical to that of "YYY".

--- only those files or directories are copied from
"XXX" to "YYY" that are NOT already present and
identical in the similar position in "YYY".

Typically I expect "XXX" and "YYY" to have about a
million files each; and the backup operation will
quickly alter a few hundred files in "YYY",
some copied from "XXX" to "YYY" (destructively), and
some simply erased from "YYY".

This seems to me to be a rather basic backup
performance; can it be accomplished by a freeware
application or a perl script or ... ?

Thanks for any hints!

Laurent S.
 
SyncBack Free is what you're looking for, in mirrored mode. A bit of a
chore to go through all the settings, but you can have it totally mirror
the folders including deleting deleted files, and it can do byte-by-byte
verify, though it will unfortunately use the Windows cache for any part
of a file that's in there.

http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html#freeware

--
Ed Light

Better World News TV Channel:
http://realnews.com

Iraq Veterans Against the War and Related:
http://ivaw.org
http://couragetoresist.org
http://antiwar.com

Send spam to the FTC at
(e-mail address removed)
Thanks, robots.
 
Laurent S said:
*** Incremental backups
Click to expand...
Recent hard disks of 1To or more are affordable but
fallible! They have incited me to regularly make many
incremental backups as described below.
Click to expand...
Thus I am seeking good answers to the following specific
question. Which MS Windows backup program should I
choose to frequently backup directory "XXX" to directory
"YYY"?
Click to expand...
I want the following backup performance:
Click to expand...
--- after the backup operation, directory "XXX" is
unchanged and "YYY" has been made to have contents
identical to that of "YYY".
Click to expand...
--- only those files or directories are copied from
"XXX" to "YYY" that are NOT already present and
identical in the similar position in "YYY".
Click to expand...
Typically I expect "XXX" and "YYY" to have about
a million files each; and the backup operation
will quickly alter a few hundred files in "YYY",
some copied from "XXX" to "YYY" (destructively), and
some simply erased from "YYY".
Click to expand...
This seems to me to be a rather basic backup
performance; can it be accomplished by a
freeware application or a perl script or ... ?
Click to expand...

Yes, xxcopy can do what you want to do.
 
*** Incremental backups



Recent hard disks of 1To or more are affordable but
fallible! They have incited me to regularly make many
incremental backups as described below.

Thus I am seeking good answers to the following specific
question. Which MS Windows backup program should I
choose to frequently backup directory "XXX" to directory
"YYY"?

I want the following backup performance:

--- after the backup operation, directory "XXX" is
unchanged and "YYY" has been made to have contents
identical to that of "YYY".

--- only those files or directories are copied from
"XXX" to "YYY" that are NOT already present and
identical in the similar position in "YYY".

Typically I expect "XXX" and "YYY" to have about a
million files each; and the backup operation will
quickly alter a few hundred files in "YYY",
some copied from "XXX" to "YYY" (destructively), and
some simply erased from "YYY".

This seems to me to be a rather basic backup
performance; can it be accomplished by a freeware
application or a perl script or ... ?

Thanks for any hints!

Laurent S.
Click to expand...

I use the 2003 edition of Robocopy for
backing up the LAN at the office and my pc
at home. Newer versions of robocopy have
issues.

Lynn
 
I want the following backup performance:

--- after the backup operation, directory "XXX" is
unchanged and "YYY" has been made to have contents
identical to that of "YYY".

--- only those files or directories are copied from
"XXX" to "YYY" that are NOT already present and
identical in the similar position in "YYY".

Typically I expect "XXX" and "YYY" to have about a
million files each; and the backup operation will
quickly alter a few hundred files in "YYY",
some copied from "XXX" to "YYY" (destructively), and
some simply erased from "YYY".
Click to expand...

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync/files/freefilesync/

Beware the adware at install. It's free.

............................

But you were asking for a BACKUP program, not a sync program,
and I do have a favorite (OK, laugh it IS old)

Backup Magic is extremely easy to use, safe, and optionally
keeps a copy of the old file, in case of corruption. Ideal for home
users. And it is VERY fast.

http://www.moonsoftware.com/files/legacy/

Their new version, Copiaris, seems complicated. Both are not
free, cost around 25 dollars for single user.

http://www.moonsoftware.com/copiaris-backup-and-file-copy-software-program.asp

I love their site policy, and the author is quite a character.

//Copyright © 1996-2014 Moon Software.
Privacy Policy is available here. This site does not use "social",
"+1", "analytics" and other similar spyware scripts.//

[]'s
 
Had a problem with Free File Sync but I don't remember what it was.
Click to expand...

It offers adware - decline it.
Practice first. If you get the arrows wrong, it WILL delete
data.
Once you've got it right, save and run it as a batch file on
startup.
[]'s
 
It wasn't the adware. It did something really bad. Maybe deleted a
profile, or a backup.

Had a problem with Free File Sync but I don't remember what it was.
Click to expand...

It offers adware - decline it.
Practice first. If you get the arrows wrong, it WILL delete
data.
Once you've got it right, save and run it as a batch file on
startup.
[]'s
Click to expand...

--
Ed Light

Better World News TV Channel:
http://realnews.com

Iraq Veterans Against the War and Related:
http://ivaw.org
http://couragetoresist.org
http://antiwar.com

Send spam to the FTC at
(e-mail address removed)
Thanks, robots.
 
Hi all,

My sincere thanks to Ed Light, Rod Speed,
Lynn McGuire, and Shadow for a wealth of
suggestions for solving my incremental
backup problem.

I have yet to dig in to test them.

I was particularly impressed to read
that "robocopy", which was recommended by
Lynn is a standard command line MSW utility
that has quite recently been perfected by MS
for its systems Vista and beyond (I use
Windows 7). It does the basic incremental
backups I described and much much much more.
It extends the earlier MSW "xcopy" terminal
command. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy

It seems that there are already some
graphical front ends for it...

Cheers,

Laurent S.

Long live our wonderful news groups!
 
Ed said:
Also XXCOPY free has a mirroring with byte-for-byte checking capability.
Only half a million command line switches.
Click to expand...

Yes, the "XXCOPY" builders claim to have
surpassed "robocopy". Also the graphic
interface "Grobocopy" for "robocopy" seems
clumsy and limited.

Cheers

Laurent S.
 
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