Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

I am trying to decide which is the best backup procedure.
 
I have over the past few years used many backup programs both free and purchased.  All have at some time failed me, or possibly it is I who have failed them, but whatever the backup has ended up in a mess.

I have now two 1gig usb externals, well, one is a Esata but my computer and/or Vista does not like it and subsequently fails to boot up, so have reverted to both on usb.

Yesterday, I switched on the two external drives before the firing up computer and unnoticed by me the drive designations were reversed, Q became R and R became Q, now that really confused both me and the backup programs!

Any way they failed as you would expect.

I thought sod it, so did a disk clone, LOL,  it took 26hours COL.

FlashPipe does a first class job of taking images off SD cards and at same time duplicating the download on the backup drive.

The problem is how to backup the files on Q drive that are subsequently processed to the R backup drive (the further processed files will probably end up in further sub folders. 

Now, it occurs to me that I never had backup problems in DOS days so wonder can anybody see a problem with running a backup from DOS? say something like:-

backup <path><filename><drive> /A /S /M   where filename is *.*   As in DOS days I could no doubt make up a bat file
 
Put simply, I want the R backup drive to be a mirror of the Q working drive,  Only image files are involved.

I can freely experiment as all the image files are safe, LOL again, on partitions on the main internal drive.

Jeff






 

Jeff,
Both I and Fred use Acronis, works a treat. I use it to do a whole C-drive back-up once per week on a schedule such that I always have 2 back-ups from different times. I do this as insurance against a HD failure.
Others, I know, do a more frequent back-up.
I have used Acronis to back up Files & folders too. They are in a compressed format so I'm not sure if you can access them directly from, say, Qimage.
I also back-up onto DVD when a folder has about 4GB of images in it.
For images, I download with FlashPipe to C-drive and a 1TB network HD I have. I use FP to update the network drive from the C-drive.
I'm not sure if this helps you or not, we all have our different ways of doing things.
Terry

Thanks Terry.

Just spent a couple of hours looking up my old info on DOS

I will look into your suggestions on my next session.

jeff

Hi Jeff,

M$ have something called synctoy (or similar) not very good imnsho - i used it for a while. I now use http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/  the freeware version does everything I want - reliably to schedule - or when required. Some of my netwark pc's are not always on, so I do a manual bu when I think of it for them - very reliable for me.

Best wishes,

Ray

Thanks Ray.

One of the two progs I am trying is BrightSparks, I have got it working quite well on my XP Computer which is used for all general work.  I will give it a good test work out on Vista's gigabites of image files.

jeff

 

FWIW, I use SyncToy for exactly what Jeff is trying to do and it works fine (have used it for a year or two). Price is right, too - free.  Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

Ed

I cleared out - deleted - all previous backups residing on the R Drive and created an ran a fresh backup with Brighsparks - Syncback.

All went well and got a perfect copy.

Will be seeing how subsequent runs pan out. 

On future runs FlashPipe will have already created some initial backups, will be interesting to see if this causes a problem.

Jeff

Both MS and now Nero have been trying more and more to get into the backup business.  Until they can get their mainstream products right I sure don't want to get backup software that needs constant "oops" patches, fixes and updates.

Acronis has worked for many years and has lots of options to do incremental and total backups.  Even has unattended schedule options.  There are a couple of others out there that are as good.

Just as QI is a print specialty program, I leave backup, photo editing, photo databasing, etc. each to software designed to do their own job.

Just run a small FlashPipe job, then messed about with the created folders – separate random deletes - on both main and backup drive, and SyncBack performed perfectly.

So the two appear to live happily together.

Jeff