Computer Backup

I use it, but the important thing to understand is that sync is not backup. Backup is a one-way process, but sync is two-way. If I delete or corrupt a file on the backup server, sync will automatically delete that file on the other machines too, which is not what you want.

There are ways to make Syncthing do 'one way only', but they're not recommended:

Thanks Theo :-)

I fell at the first hurdle having down-loaded the simple installer for simple Windows users, there is nothing in the file that looks anything like a Windows exe or msi!

I will keep looking....

Are you looking at the releases which has a setup.exe:

I down-loaded the easy setup zip, I will look at that. I am a bit concerned if it's a two way sync, I want one way with the ability to restore individual files but haven't found anything yet...

Have tried:

Syncthing - can't find out how to add a destination. EasUSBackup - backed up fine but it seems I can only restore the complete directory Windows File History - uses the most peculiar terminology, once I got though that it was happy to back up everything except my official My Documents directory (actually D:\Data).

There's a fortune awaiting the person who writes Time Machine for Windows...

I have used Microsoft SyncToy for many years. It doesn't continuously sync, but it gives me control over when I sync two storage areas (eg PC internal drive and USB HDD or SAMBA-shared network storage), and allows me to see and control which files need to be updated/deleted/added/deleted.

It has several levels of syncing - eg new files on the source are replicated to the destination but changes to the destination are not replicated to the source; changes to either source or destination are replicated to the other; and another mode which I have forgotten.

The advantage of SyncToy over some types of backup is that it performs file and folder copying, so the backup is an exact replica of the source. Some backups save the backup to a humungous merged zip file in a proprietary format, so you need run run the backup software if you need to retrieve a specific file that has got corrupted in the live system, rather than just doing a manual file copy. It also allows the "backup" to be a live filesystem - eg syncing a folder structure on a desktop PC with a folder structure on a laptop, such that files both can be accessed with normals apps such as Word, Excel etc and I just want to keep them in sync.

I'm sure there are newer equivalents of SyncToy which has not been updated for many years - but it works, so why change?

I have been using Karen's Replicator which is similar, see karenware.com The author, Karen Kenworthy, died in 2011 but the website and software still seem to be working, for me at least.

Wow, there's a name to bring back memories, used to follow her in my VB days. RIP Karen.

"Time Machine saves hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month until the volume runs out of space. At that point, Time Machine deletes the oldest weekly backup."

Macrium Reflect has Incremental Forever, and MRIMG files can be mounted for specific file access (you don't have to restore a 4TB disk to get one stinking file back, it's easier than that).

Windows File History keeps track of more granular file history, using an external drive. It dumps to the external drive at intervals. It may ask to have the external connected, for a dump, while it runs. To restore a deleted file, you can restore the folder above it. Something like that.

Deleted files, are not actually deleted. Just a flag byte is flipped, indicating the $MFT entry is available for reuse. If you use a copy of Recuva and the file has a "green dot" rating indicating nothing has overwritten the storage area, the flag byte can be flipped back. Recuva was free from Piriform, and Piriform was bought out at some point,

If you drop a file into an unknown folder, volumes can be listed with NFI.exe . It can list things in C:\System Volume Information for example.

cd /d %userprofile%\Downloads # On a BAD drive, don't be writing to the BAD drive !!! Pick another storage. nfi.exe c: > nfi-c-out.txt notepad nfi-c-out.txt

with the Volume Shadow Service, copies of "hot" file systems can be made. Macrium can be working on your C: drive, while you work. It cannot back up pagefile.sys (which does not need a backup). It cannot back up Windows.edb (W10) or Windows.db (W11), but these files can be regenerated by the Search Indexer. Thunderbird is generally fine, except in cases where the parser is "stuck" on a corrupted .sdb . That's the only situation that is suspect. Check the Macrium .log file for a session, to ascertain whether there are any VSS issues of note. If a file is listed as cannot backup, find out why.

The Free version of Macrium could do:

Full Differential

The paid version of Macrium can do:

Full Differential Incremental Incremental Forever File-by-file (details not researched, user manual available for product as PDF)

The "Windows 7 Backup" in the Control Panels of W7, W8, W10, W11, is not recommended, as the control over what is being backed up is a bit on the poor side. The .vhd containers per partition, can be easily mounted for recovery. Later versions of W7B, stored files in .vhdx and that's more than a nuisance for one-off file spelunking. I prefer monolithic files (like the .mrimg type), as it can be a bit easier to examine and make sense of what you've got.

With Macrium, you can back up an entire machine in one shot. You can back up every drive, to a single MRIMG. I recommend a finer granularity in your backup configuration than that. But if you're in a hurry, you can boot the Macrium CD and just tell it to take 11 TB of files and stick them on that new 24TB external drive you bought. As a single MRIMG, a file that can be mounted. Then the only issue, is the job finishing before morning. 11TB at 150MB/sec would take a while (20 hours?). Since Macrium protects content with a checksum, the fastest backup speed possible is around 300+ MB/sec. Fine for disks, not fine for that PCIe Rev5 NVMe that runs many times faster than that. You would have to be content with the 300MB/sec.

You can request a "Verify" of an MRIMG at rest on your disk drive. That can check that the file has not become corrupted since first stored. I managed to determine I had bad RAM on the WinXP machine, using Macrium Verify (the bad RAM was in driver buffer country). Not all "bad RAM" cases can be detected that easily. Many other backup softwares in Windows, do similar things to this. Macrium has a pretty good history, implying they test their software. (One Macrium issue, was caused by changes Microsoft made, and then everyone else has to clean up the mess.)

For speed, the Windows 7 Backup cannot be beat. That's because it has no integrity checks at all (ow!), and it runs as fast as the software stack will go :-) Too bad it sucks a bit. I don't see a reason that could not do 2GB/sec with the right equipment.

On Macrium, the default is to use Medium compression. I have some use-cases where I turn that off. It has no option for "good" compression such as .xz or .7z or .rar . For archives I don't expect to be needing, I use .7z on those. (Or, I delete the archive.) Any .mrimg here tagged with "ERASEME", that means at the slightest provocation, those can be deleted.

Paul

I hadn't realised Karen had died and at the relatively young age of 71. Sad to hear.

I sometimes still use her Power Tools on an old Windows system.

Scroll down to the Back up these folders section. Click Add a folder.

Well, not quite.

I tried the "obvious way" and it didn't work. The interface didn't even complain when I added H:\TEST to the group of folders for File History. So I asked CoPilot the question.

Question:

How does windows 10 File History feature work ? Can it have folders like H:\TEST added in addition to folders residing in the users profile area C:\users\username ? Or must all the folders for File History capture be somewhere on C:\ ?

CoPilot:

### Adding Folders Outside the User Profile Yes, you **can** include folders like `H:\TEST` in your File History backups — but there’s a trick:

You need to **add that folder to a Library**.

File History only backs up content from Libraries, so by adding your custom folder to one, you’re effectively telling File History to include it.

Here’s how:

1. Right-click the folder (e.g., `H:\TEST`) in File Explorer.
2. Select **Include in library**.
3. Choose an existing library (like Documents) or create a new one.

Once that’s done, File History will treat it like any other folder in your user profile and back it up accordingly.

So no, your folders **don’t have to be on C:\\** — they just need to be part of a Library. That includes folders on other internal drives, external drives, or even mapped network locations (as long as they’re accessible).

You can create new libraries, so you are not limited to the existing libraries. Think of the fun (or something) :-)

Apparently, there is some difference between W10 doing this and W11 doing this. But I'm going to save my surprised face for another day. At this point, we don't even know what the support is like, for Libraries.

First I check for the existence of the control file.

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries\Pictures.library-ms # Windows 11 C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries\Pictures.library-ms # Windows 10

You can find articles like this.

Paul

I deliberately do *not* have my main backup drive on-line all the time. One of the threats I am particularly worried about is a ransomware attack locking my files, and if your backup drive is always on then it can be locked too as well as your live files.

It forgot to tell you it must be NTFS. "D:\Data" is in the Documents library as it is "My Documents" relocated the official Windows way. It is though exFAT*.

Ah, thereby hangs a tale.

If your backup server mounts the live server only when backup is needed, it is not accessible to any malware on the main one.

Of course if it then backs up up an encrypted file system, all bets are off. But that happens anyway.

I have her full suite of tools. I believe her brother (or some other close relation) eventually took over management of the programmes & web site.

-

I use Free File Sync but I only back up programmes which are on a different drive to the Operating System. -

I am experimenting.

I have re-formatted the drive to NTFS and set up File History and Windows is working its way through backing it up to a NAS.

It will be a while before I can see exactly what it is doing but I will report back. It's about 60 GB of data, I don't really need versioning for my multimedia.

Bear in mind that the most probable reason for needing a backup is fat-fingers deleting the wrong file. It's the only reason that I have ever had to restore from backup tapes.

If you synchonise folders you will delete the backup too.

Macrium claims to have an anti-ransomware feature. Presumably intended to protect a folder used to store backups.

"Macrium Reflect Home includes Macrium Image Guardian, which prevents ransomware from targeting backup files. It grants write access only to Macrium-specific file types, making unauthorized modifications nearly <=== YMMV impossible."

This shows the interface for MIG.

The File History is NOT a backup. It's a way of reversing a change you made during the work day. While it would be unfortunate if the (poorly protected) File History drive got attacked, it's your backup software that you trust for the long term. and you make as many copies as you feel you must, on the real backup product. The File History is a kind of "resiliency protection", giving you options besides the usage of Recuva.

One of the reasons it is not a backup, is because it is hard to determine what is in there. The format is hard to verify visually, as to what is going on, if you're a person who checks that their scheme is still working on Tuesday.

The users of File History, find that it involves squirrels, because the users claim that copies were not made, when they expected them to be made. File History only makes actual copies, if a file changes, it is doing "functional dedup", so no two sequential copies of "TEST.txt" have the same checksum. The storage characteristic should be relatively close to "incremental", in terms of its impact on storage. Like if you have 200GB of mostly static content, then maybe you only make

Like all schemes on computers, you have to test them... because it is the year 2025.

This is one of the reasons I like backup utilities with monolithic containers. Relatively simple to understand, you can run a verify on them, you can mount them for individual file access, and so on. It is a relatively easy model to understand.

All sorts of whizzy schemes have failure modes. You would think various cheap RAID schemes would be "bulletproof". Someone had a SIL3112 two port SATA running in RAID 1 mirror. One of the disks died. The assumption is, with a mirror, the two disks are identical. The owner in this case discovered, the array had stopped mirroring three months earlier, so the epoch of the remaining drive was three months out of date. It's like discovering your car never had wheels on it :-/ There was apparently no visible symptoms, no toast or status on the screen, warning the thing was not really a RAID any more. It's hard to say what the software was doing at that point. Such computers should have a UPS, with the shutdown cable joined from the UPS box to a port on the computer, so after two minutes the UPS can signal for a clean shutdown. Improving the odds the two disks remain mirrors. Maybe a real RAID card, reports what it is doing.

Paul