Backup/restore/external drive advice wanted please

[whisky-dave]

y backup folder on external hard drive windows asks if i want to overwrite or skip duplicated files with the same date.

Yes because that is classed as a copy NOT a backup , the clue here is when you 'copy' the folder. if I do this on my mac I get an extra option to merge the files, skip or re place.

A backup system would lok at the name of the file thens it;s creation date and the modified date if the modified date is more recent then it will copy just those files over to your backup. Proper backup software would NOT del ete the older file but would create a new one, without deleting the old one , just in case you need it.

Yep it skips files, skip the whole folder and it copies really fast ;-)

[tabbypurr]

or save everything every however often you choose and don't bother deduping it.

NT

[Bill]

I have a writer friend who used to do this and ended up with utter chaos.

Files have to be closed before they will copy, so you have to be certain where all the data files are and that they are all closed.

Far better to take occasional full images of the machine and then regular backups of specific areas of data. I use Macrium for the images and SyncToy for the backups of data, the data being organised so that it is in a known area rather than lost in Microsoft'e virtual directories.

My reason for sticking to SyncToy is that I still do some audio work on different machines and the audio (and video) is set to make cumulative backups rather than destructive or duplicate ones.

[tabbypurr]

it's about the simplest way to backup going, and simplest way to restore data. If they ended up with chaos I can only conclude they were doing something else. It also has the benefit of keeping a few copies of earlier versions.

not on any PC I've ever used. I can't imagine not knowing where my data is, though I know there are users like that.

why would you not just backup the lot frequently in one move? Any data you've not backed up in a while is going to be far out of date, and your approach much complicates restoring data if you have a drive or FS die.

NT

[Tim Watts]

I agree. The best backup system "just works" whenever it can.

That's why I like Tresorit (but it could be any number of cloud solutions). If my computer is logged in as me, and has Internet access, the client is running and syncing. As it's hooked into the linux dnotify subsystem, it's efficient too as the kernel pings it whenever somehting changed or got added.

You could probably do something home based with a NAS too - it's really about how good the backup software is.

[Tim Watts]

I have this at work - dedup is on the storage machine itself. It manages an amazing amount of savings - each backup set (even full cycles) adds only a very small extra dint in the space remaining.

[Bill]

In message , [e-mail] writes

Maybe it's a question of scale. My writer friend has something like

650GB of text and over a TB of music on a separate machine. He is currently backing up to a separate 2TB drive in his main machine and a 2TB external drive (he can't get his head round networking). I have several machines with audio and video and backup over the network to a pair of Linux backup servers. There is nothing complicated about the data backups with my system. The D: drives on the machines just have a couple, 3 at most, base directories set up for ease of backing up - Media for the cumulative backups, another base directory for the files that need to be synchronised. Nothing anywhere like My Documents, My Music etc. For example the Media directories all have subdirectories for video, pics, audio and the further subdirectories as required. The cumulative stuff is merged on the servers, the individual machine stuff held separately. Everything is uncompressed and unencrypted, so can be accessed simply over the network. Only the first backup takes hours or days. Once set up, it's simple and quite quick.

[Handsome Jack]

xcopy d:\usr\*.* H:\Archive /d/s/i/c/r/h/y/f will copy all new files and folders on d:\usr to the backup drive h:, and overwrite existing backed-up files on H: with the newer versions on d:, without deleting anything on H.

But sometimes it's handy to keep the earlier versions.