Which Back-Up software?

Ryan111

Ryan111

Ryan111

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I have bought 2 x 1TB drives to put the bulk of my media on. I have so far put it onto the first drive and want to know which software would allow me to run a copy from 1 to the other every night at say 3am (Its in my server left on 24/7)

I have used synctoy before, but it has issues copying files if they are in use (which could happen if I set downloads over night etc)

Is there any software that will skip the "in-use" items and come back to them at the end? Or even skip it, and I could just set the back up to run at say 1am, 4am, 7am etc?

Sorry if im not making much sense :P
 
robocopy

it's like synctoy, but commandline


set your downloads to only move to that folder when they are complete (or manage them yourself in the day, so they'll never be copied when in use)
 
bledd. said:
robocopy

it's like synctoy, but commandline


set your downloads to only move to that folder when they are complete (or manage them yourself in the day, so they'll never be copied when in use)
Click to expand...

This. I use robocopy all over the place at home and at work. Very easy to use, and as bledd. says, if you simply have your downloads go to a different folder until they are complete you wont have to worry about it.
 
Putting the active downloads in a seperate folder should have been straight forward, but I completely overlooked it :P

I will have a look at robocopy, thanks :)
 
Many download clients, especially BitTorrent and Newsgroup clients, tend to have the option to move stuff once the download is complete. Might be worth looking into.
 
Ryan, this is how you copy from a>b with robocopy


robocopy /e "C:\source folder" "D:\destination folder"

One the first run, it will copy all files from C to D
On every run after that, it will only copy files that are updated (ie a word doc that has been resaved) or files that are now on C but not on D
 
I have seperated my "Downloading" and "Downloaded" folders, so that makes things much easier.

How would I set robocopy to copy the entire contents of D:/ to E:/ bar one folder? Can you exclude folders? And how would I run it as a scheduled task?
 
Ryan111 said:
I have seperated my "Downloading" and "Downloaded" folders, so that makes things much easier.

How would I set robocopy to copy the entire contents of D:/ to E:/ bar one folder? Can you exclude folders? And how would I run it as a scheduled task?
Click to expand...

Code: 
robocopy "D:\" "E:\" /S /XD "D:\GoatPr0n"

Put that in a text file and rename to "backup.bat".

You can use Scheduled Tasks [part of Windows] to have it run backup.bat periodically.

EDIT:

/S is for subfolders [it will only do the contents - i.e. files - in the source without this parameter].
/XD excludes directories.
/XF excludes files, and supports wildcards - should you ever need to to exclude anything really specific.
 
Last edited:
Right, so my downloading folder is D:/Downloading (Keeping it simple)

So the robocopy command would be

Code: 
robocopy "D:\" "E:\" /S /XD "D:\Downloading"

I want E:/ to become a 'mirror' image of D:/, Ie, if I delete something on D, it deletes it on E? And also not the other way round, so If i delete something of E, it doesnt delete of D.
 
Last edited:
Ryan111 said:
Right, so my downloading folder is D:/Downloading (Keeping it simple)

So the robocopy command would be

Code: 
robocopy "D:\" "E:\" /S /XD "D:\Downloading"

I want E:/ to become a 'mirror' image of D:/, Ie, if I delete something on D, it deletes it on E? And also not the other way round, so If i delete something of E, it doesnt delete of D.
Click to expand...

robocopy /MIR /R:1 /W:1 d:\ e:\

Will completely mirror d:\ to e:\ - if a file is in use it will not retry more than once, with a wait of one (defailt retry is something stupid like 1,000).

No need to worry about setting new permissions (this is also copied) or about excluding folders - if the file is in use it will be skipped over and got on the next run. Minimises the disk activity...

Edit - note the /MIR command will also delete files from e:\ if removed from the source d:\ in the above example.
 
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