Best / easiest (hopefully free) HDD syncing software?

[TheBigCheese]

Hi guys

I want to back up my internal HDDs to external HDDs.

I use the internals every day, so at the end of the day I want the changes made on the internals to be sent over to the externals - deleting anything unneeded, updating files, etc. etc.

Basically a mirror of the internal drive that updates automatically.

I will be partitioning the external HDDs when they come to make them the same size as the internal drives, I don't know whether that makes a difference to the software used, but I thought I should mention it!

SyncBackPro seems to do what I want but I was wondering if anyone could recommend something?


Thanks very much!

 

[bledd]

I just use robocopy, fast free and part of Windows.


robocopy /mir "c:\example\source folder" "f:\example\destination folder"



Type that into Notepad, save it as 'files backup.bat' (not .bat.txt), then each time you double click the .bat file, it will copy saved & new files/folders from source to destination.

You can schedule it, but I prefer to run the manually on demand.

 

[Dano]

Macrium Reflect now does incremental backups too

 

[TheBigCheese]

Thanks for the replies guys!

bledd, sounds interesting, but I'd be happier with a proper GUI I think.

Thanks for the name Dano, is that one of the best to use? I don't even understand half of what it says it does!

 

[MagicBoy]

A "GUI" would just run the same Robocopy anyway?

One click and it does what you requests and for no money. What's not to like?

 

[TheBigCheese]

A "GUI" would just run the same Robocopy anyway?

One click and it does what you requests and for no money. What's not to like?

That's just my personal preference.

Also, would it auto-delete the stuff I remove from the source drive? That's a pretty important feature for me as I'm changing what's on the drives constantly, that's one of the reasons for wanting the backup - wear and tear.

 

[bledd]

With robocopy, there are many different switches you can use, if you open CMD and type..

robocopy /?

It will list all the options, also listed here

---

If you wanted it to copy but never delete missing files, you would just use..

robocopy /e "c:\source" "d:\destination"

---

I suggested the /mir option as this does what you asked for.

First run it will copy all files/folders, every run after that it will copy newly created and newly modified files, as well as removing files that don't exist any more.

---

You can add logging to text file(s) too if that floats your boat.


---

@echo off

color 8c
title Backing up Documents
robocopy /e "c:\Documents" "b:\Backup\Documents" /R:1 /W:1
color 8a
echo.
pause

^This would colour the Window, set a title and pause for the report at the end , the /R means how many times to retry (if a file is locked for example) and /W says how long to wait between retries.