Backup utility

[Krony]

Hi, i currently use a 1Tb Samsung F3 for storage (videos, images and general documents) and a 1Tb Samsung F1 which i use as a backup drive for the other, basically about once a month i just copy and paste the whole drive from the F3 to the F1 but as u can imagine this takes quite a few hours as it re-writes every file even thoes that have not changed, is there any programs that would just copy any new files and any that have changed ?

 

[chuchnit]

Acronis True Image and I *think* the built in backup utility in Vista/7 but I'm not sure about the latter.

 

[Krony]

Trying the windows 7 utility now thx.

 

[qubit]

The freebie Karen's Replicator is excellent for doing all sorts of backups, including ones that trigger at a regular interval. I use it to make the sort of image backup that you do. It'll skip the files that already exist and save lots of time and prevent human error.

www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp

Note that if you choose to do an image backup with Karen's, be absolutely sure that you have the source and destination specified the right way round. Otherwise, copying to a blank destination will simply result in both drives being blank. This is true of any backup utility and isn't a fault with Karen's.

I think there's also another freebie called Deltacopy, which is supposed to be much more efficient, as it will only copy the changed parts of files. This is really handy for very large files, such as Outlook .pst files. However, I've not used it yet, so cant vouch for it.

 

[twilyth]

Cobian backup will do file backups locally or to ftp, with or without encryption and compression. However it doesn't do image backups, which is really what you need if want to fully restore your system.

I've used the W7 back up program and Acronis a few times to restore a system and both work great. With Acronis though, you need to burn the recovery cd they suggest FOR EACH and EVERY machine you use it on.

One problem with W7 backup is that seems to break easily. On one machine I did an upgrade re-install and the backup utility doesn't work. No luck in trouble shooting it either. So I now rely on Acronis exclusively for image backups. But I use Cobian for file backups to ftp.

 

[newtekie1]

I just use a Robocopy script setup in a bat file and scheduled through task scheduler.

 

[Krony]

Well i tried the W7 utility and on my system it takes days lol and everytime u run a new backup it does the entire thing again, i'll try Karen's as the main thing i am after is just backing up video's and pic's and some other documents to another drive in case the drive they are on goes bad and i wanted it to only copy changed or new files.
I'll probably still use W7 for a System Image for the OS tho.

 

[digibucc]

my preferred method is rsync, which does have a windows implementation: delta copy
it's free, open-source , and incremental. it takes a few minutes to set up, but it is fully automated afterwards and can do multiple backups with plenty of options.

i haven't tried the other software on this page, syncify. it may be worth looking into as well.

 

[Krony]

Karen's Replicator worked a treat, first backup of maybe 500Gb took about 90 mins then a added in a few new video files to that drive and ran it again and it took maybe 4 mins

 

[Drone]

ghost