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
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 ... ?

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.

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".

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.

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.

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

--
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.

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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