Do I want to Backup or Sync?

[FnG]magnolia · 15 Oct 2009 at 22:44

Hi,

Looking for some advice here as I've managed to confuse myself

I have a large number of photos and other important documents on one of my harddrives which I want to backup to an external drive. The photos are sometimes edited, cropped, etc but this is quite sporadic. The improtant documents do no get looked at, they're simply there incase my HD blows up.

Now, given that I'm working with some of the files but not all, do I want to sync these files or back them up? I'm not entirely sure what the difference is! I started by using synctoy 2.0 which seems fine but has no task setup function (to make it automatic). I have also downloaded GFI Backup

Can someone give me a pointer as to which tool I need and why? Cheers.

jbloggs · 15 Oct 2009 at 22:51

no task setup function (to make it automatic

You could use Task Scheduler with SyncToy, or try EZBack-it-up which has a scheduler as part of it...

rctneil · 15 Oct 2009 at 23:42

I ahve switched to use Synkron in Sync mode. I use sync as my main backup and do a full sync of my user folder when everything is in a good state and it only backs up and syncs files that ahve been altered or changed

ArtificialFoxx · 16 Oct 2009 at 00:09

I use GFI Backup,
Backup = Copies your files to another location (what you want)
Sync = Makes sure your files are the same as the files in another location (used if some files are modified/changed in either location e.g. if the files are on two computers but you want to keep them the same on both PCs)

[FnG]magnolia · 16 Oct 2009 at 00:33

Ok, so I just want to backup my photos and documents and when I make changes to them this will be captured the next time the backup schedule is run? Or do I need to set up a sync as well as the backup (when using GFI) ?