Backup solution?

Craig321

Craig321

Craig321

Soldato
Joined
2 May 2004
Posts
19,950
Hi,

I have ~1.2TB of data on my 1.5TB drive which of course needs backing up.

My backup drive is 1.5TB as well.

I've been using Acronis for a while. It does a full backup, a certain amount of incrementals, it then deletes all the backups and re-creates a new, full backup. This works quite nicely, but if the drive happens to fail just after Acronis has deleted the backups then I lose everything.

I can't use consolidation as there's not enough space on the backup drive.

Are there any backup programs that will, for example, consolidate without using a temporary file? So it would basically merge every backup every x days without using a temporary file to do so.

Any ideas or suggestions that don't involve me buying another backup HD?

Thanks.

Craig
 
Might sound obvious but can you not stop it deleting the full backup? I run a full backup once and then a daily differential for one of mine and it works fine.

You could find holes in a lot of backup plans in the sense that for a short period of time you have a window where things could go badly wrong. You have to consider how likely it is to happen and whether it justifies buying an additional disk.
 
I use FreeFileSYnc which works perfectly, mirrors from left to right and updates deleted data from the destination or vice versa depending on what criteria you set. It's also very fast and obviously free. No issues there!
 
I've used all of the above in the past including SyncBack, Cobian and some others.

Would love to use SyncBack or something else similar as I know for a fact it'll do what I need, but I've never seen it as something that will be suitable for such a large backup?

JayMax said:
Is this an OS backup or just files?
Synctoy/robocopy/xcopy if the latter.
Click to expand...

File backup. I don't backup my OS, no need.

Craig
 
Last edited:
Unless you were backing up OS, databases, permissions, exchange etc I don't see the need for a complex solution - you just need a simple file copy.
Once your initial sync is done - which will take take time and you'll have no compression, but you just need a duplicate imo. Synctoy is your easiest option, unless you like or have need for CLI switches.
K.I.S.S :)
 
Thanks for the answers guys. I'm setting up SyncBack at the moment to see what I can get out of it as I'd like 'separate incrementals' which I know you can do quite easily with that using the variables. I'll have another play with Robocopy/Synctoy if it doesn't work out.

Craig.
 
RoboCopy is probably just as powerful, but not as nice to use (IMO) as SyncBack. I use SyncBack on our web server and it works very nicely without fail. Extremely reliable in my experience of it. Far more than Acronis.

SyncBack is working really nicely for me now, I have the following structure/setup:

Folders:
Backup\FULL
Backup\2
Backup\3
Backup\4
Backup\5
Backup\6
Backup\7

I did the first full backup today which was actually a lot quicker than I thought it would be, although I'm not sure on the exact time as it failed on one file meaning the task kept on running until I got home from work, but never mind!

It'll then do a backup for every day of the week in the separate folders. On the first day of every the week it will then run a full backup which will basically work like an incremental on top of the FULL folder. Then, when it comes back to re-use a day-of-the-week folder it removes the contents before it starts.

I have also set it to delete files from the backup that don't exist anymore as long as they haven't been edited in the last x days (x is currently 30, so I'll see how that goes).

Thanks for all the suggestions guys, I now finally have a safe backup, plus it means incrementals don't rely on the full backup anymore (which was the case in Acronis). :)
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom