Backup / mirror drives - incremental backups & Dropboxing & symbolic links

[Azza]

May as well ask about all this in one thread so here we go with the first part.


Basically if I store my data on E and want to back it up to F & G incrementally what's the best way of going about this?

So what I want is to have have E:\Data backed up to F twice... one original and another a mirror sync that updates on the fly as E:\Data changes.

Then after say 4 weeks or something the original backup, mirrors E:\Data and the same happen in another 4 weeks and so on and so on.

And have the same happening on another backup drive.


Can Robocopy or FreeFileSync do this? Or is there a better alternative?



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Secondly.

With F:\Data\Precious would I be able to create a symbolic link of that to C:\Me\Dropbox ... and I assume that no problems would occur with their being two backups on the same drive? The symbolic link won't be duplicated or anything?



I want my setup to resemble something like this - http://goo.gl/wak8w

 

[Azza]

Alsoooooo if the backup drives were encrypted volumes with Truecrypt would you be able to do the backups fine with what ever program is suitable?

 

[Azza]

No one have any program suggestions?

 

[zeegy]

You can tell Robocopy to only copy files that have changed. so in theroy you can do this with a few batch files. the incrimental imaging wouldnt be instant, but depending on how much data we are talking about should be backed up within a few minutes. perhaps run it as a service so you can tell it to restart should it fail - look at something like 'NTWrapper' to do this.

the monthly full backup will be down again to other batch files that run within your windows task sheduler (as you stated robocopy i guess you are using windows!)

As for the encryption based issue, it depends how you are cloning the data from one disk to another. if you are doing disk imaging then no, if you are copying files. then yes.

 

[Azza]

After some reading I think I should be able to do all this with Robocopy, and setting the batch file up as a scheduled task at specific time increments.

 

[Essexraptor]

Just consider the phyiscal locations of your backup drives

if they are all in the same box.... it's a pretty mute from the secure (theft, system failure) angle

if remote devices..... your going to have to ensure that they are on to receive the data in sync with your schedule.

It's a good plan Just tweak it to schedule your priority data in order of importance to you. Obviously if some data is more of a historical nature or archive material you put it lower and less frequent.

 

[KIA]

Alsoooooo if the backup drives were encrypted volumes with Truecrypt would you be able to do the backups fine with what ever program is suitable?

Do you want to backup the container itself or the content inside the container?

 

[CircleFaust]

can i jump in

i'm after an even simpler solution. i need to backup my work laptop

i have a small external HDD (usb)

i want a simple program that i can run every now and then to make incremental backups
something that maybe runs with little resource in the background

will those programs mentioned be ok?


thanks