Back-up utility question

[Saudade]

I've been trying to figure out how to use the Windows back-up utility to
automatically back-up files every time I change them. Thus far, I can't see
how to do it. I see how to schedule weekly or daily back-ups, but I'm
writing a book--that's not good at all. Every single change I make has to
be immediately backed up (preferably on two external hard-drives
simultaneously). Can this be done through Windows or do I need a
third-party program (and if so, what's a good one)?

Many thanks,
S.

 

[Guest]

That's fine, but what about fire, hurricane, flood and burglaries. I have
"online" backup via the internet besides backup to an external drive.

A friend of mine was developing a commercial program written in C++ when his
PC was stolen in a burglary, along with the backup drive, losing 2 years
worth of work.

Burglars have no mercy. Floods are not not going to spare your external drive.

 

[JS]

Look at this and see if meets your needs.
http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp

Most utilities will only make/save changes after the file have been
saved/updated to the hard disk. If you want immediate backups on a word by
word basis as you write the book, then the above utility will not do it.

JS

 

[Saudade]

Can you tell me how your online backup works? Are you just using FTP to a
site, or are you using a special program that automatically keeps things
current in terms of changes?

Thanks,
S.

 

[Guest]

Saudale:

I signed up with a service promoted by Quickbooks.

After you sign on, you download a uitlity onto your PC. The procedure is
basically:

- The utlity displays your Hard Drive in like in "explorer" fashion, with
checkboxes next to drives, folders, and files, where you can pick and choose
which "collections of data needs to be backed up" . For instance, I back up
"my Documents", Quickbbooks, and Turbo Tax., among others.

- The data for the selected data set is then sent online, uploaded from your
PC to a remote server.

- You can choose to backup as often as you like, but in subsequent backups,
only files when data has changed is backed up. The utility also syncs your
data to those on the server, and deletes files no longer on your hard drive.
The PC at my business is backed up nightly in this fashion.

- They also retain the last several versions of each file (I think up to 7),
so you can go back past the last several versions. If your disk drive suffers
from "creeping corruption", the last data set or two might be corrupt, and
unusable even if recovered. Or you might make changes to a spreadsheet, or a
chapter of a book, and really messed up, and you want to go back to the
version you had two or three weeks ago.

- Another way I use this service is I can pick a file to recover thru the
internet, so I could be on vacation, have a laptop, and download the
particular file thru the services "server".

- There are several levels to this service, and the one I chose is for
storage up to 10 Gigs of data, where I pay $14.95/month. There are other
levels, but I don't recall what all of them are. I'm an AOL customer as well,
and they are currently promoting "Xdrive", a service for remote data storage
that I used for free several years ago.

- Basically, if you have a "high speed connection", uploading of data takes
minutes a day depending on how much data is changed for the day. The initial
upload of all my data took several hours.

So far, I had my home PC crashed on me once since I had the service, and at
the time I did not have an external USB drive that I can recover entire
subdirectories like in Norton Ghost that I currently use to backup to an
external USB storage device, and I had to download files from the remote
server I needed one by one. Found it somewaht inconvenient, but maybe I
wasn't doing right. At least, I didn't lose ALL my data that otherwise would
have been the case. I have a rental business, and it would had been a
disaster if I had to redo all of the leases I stored on my PC.