Best automatic backup software

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dss

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Joined
6 Oct 2007
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Looking to back up selected folders (music, documents and .torrent files)onto another internal hard drive. hoping for automatic, but one touch (ish) back up will be fine. running vista x86.
any reccomendations? thanks
 
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i've just written a batch file, which is just what i needed. but i'd like to compress the files using winRAR. my current script is

"

@Echo off
:: variables
set drive=F:\Backup
SET dateNtime="%date:~0,2%-%date:~3,2%-%date:~6,6%_%time:~0,2%-%time:~3,2%"
set backupcmd=xcopy /s /c /d /e /h /i /r /y



echo ### Backing up Music...
%backupcmd% "E:\Music" "%drive%\%dateNtime%\Music"

echo ### Backing up Favorites...
%backupcmd% "E:\Documents" "%drive%\%dateNtime%\Documents"

echo ### Backing up Torrents...
%backupcmd% "E:\Torrents" %drive%\%dateNtime%\Torrents

echo ### Backing up Pictures...
%backupcmd% "E:\Pictures" %drive%\%dateNtime%\Pictures


echo Backup Complete!
@pause
"

anyone know how i would get winRAR to compress the backup files?
thanks
 
there's not much point backing up 'media' files, as they're usually compressed already, like mp3's etc

if you want to compress them though, use 7zip

7za.exe is the standalone commandline version, much better than winrar, plus it's free :)

has a very good manual (in a chm file), I use robocopy & 7zip for backing up important files for all users in work, dream combination

if you want to hold the mp3 files (assuming they are mp3) in a 7z container (instead of compressing them too -this will save time) you can set the compression to fastest, or zero compression


robocopy is much better than xcopy (it's made by ms too, it's included in vista, and downloadable for 2000, xp, 2003), it'll only copy new or updated files on each run following the first one

^ie, incremental backups
 
thanks, that sounds a lot better!

any chance anyone could write me a basic robocopy script similar to my old xcopy one, but only backing up new files and then compressing with 7zip, it is confusing me too much. thanks!

i would like to back up E:\Music, E:\Torrents and E:\Pictures all to F:\Backup
 
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backup to F:\Backup\Music, F:\Backup\Pictures, F:\Backup\Torrents yeah?



you'd be better off setting NTFS compression on the F:\Backup folder i reckon, right click the folder F:\Backup, propeties, advanced, compress, click ok

any new files or folders added to this will be compressed, it's not as much compression as zipping them, but the hard drive will compress them on the fly (as in when the files are copied there), and it decompresses them on the fly too, works really really well there's a slight slowdown in copying files to and from it, but it's barely noticable (i'm fussy with slowdowns etc)


i'll whack together a robocopy file for you in a min (best to use 3x scripts to get it done because of the 3 source folders -much like you've done with xcopy) gimme a few mins, just got in from work, need a tea
 
Yeh, back up E:\music to F:\Backup\Music, E:\Torrents to F:\Backup\Torrents, E:\Pictures to F:\Backup\Pictures and E:\Documents to F:\Backup\Documents - sorry, i forgot about documents. sure thing mate, ive got an english tutor for an hour now anyway, so take as long as you need, much appriciated
 
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Code: 
robocopy.exe "D:\Documents" "E:\Backup\Documents" /S /ZB /COPYALL /LOG:E:\Backup\Documents.txt /DCOPY:T /R:10 /TEE
robocopy.exe "D:\Pictures" "E:\Backup\Pictures" /S /ZB /COPYALL /LOG:E:\Backup\Pictures.txt /DCOPY:T /R:10 /TEE
robocopy.exe "D:\Torrents" "E:\Backup\Torrents" /S /ZB /COPYALL /LOG:E:\Backup\Videos.txt /DCOPY:T /R:10 /TEE
robocopy.exe "D:\Music" "E:\Backup\Music" /S /ZB /COPYALL /LOG:E:\Backup\Music.txt /PURGE /DCOPY:T /R:10 /TEE
PAUSE
EXIT

Save that as a bat file :)
This is all a matter of preference, but i set Music to purge files on the destination backup, so that if you delete or move music around the folders that are on the backup drive that aren't present on the source drive are removed. The same could be done for others, but i find music compounds and builds up pretty quick! Whereas document and pictures aren't so bad, and i'd never want to lose any pictures! You may want to do this with torrents but i'm unsure really i don't use torrents myself nor try and back them up.

If you want to zip them too (i think this is not needed) then play around with 7zip as bledd says :)

Edit oh and this saves a logfile of the last backup (overwrites it in this case) per backup in the root backup folder.
 
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Probably not particularly, i think robocopy in essence is more customisable, and also easier to schedule and run as a background task with the minimum of resources and fuss :)

Not sure about synctoy, but robocopy is also FANTASTIC over networks :)
 
bledd. said:
will do this tonight, sorry, got into GTA4 last night
Click to expand...

haha, its ok, i understand, unfortuantly my xbox has 3red lights, so no GTA for me, probably a good thing as i'd waste time playing and not revising

thanks a lot LeperousDust:)
 
you'll need the /E switch also to get subdirectories

chuck robocopy.exe into c:\windows\system32 folder, so you don't need to tell it the path to the exe
 
Really, i use that without the /e switch and it copies my subdirectories =/ ?

No you don't a quick check reveals copyall does what /e does but copies attributes too :) IMO nicer...
 
LeperousDust said:
Really, i use that without the /e switch and it copies my subdirectories =/ ?

No you don't a quick check reveals copyall does what /e does but copies attributes too :) IMO nicer...
Click to expand...

The reason it copies subdirectories is your using the '/S' parameter. The '/E' parameter does the same thing but also copies empty subdirectories.
 
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