Automatic Hard Drive Back Up
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- Re: Automatic Hard Drive Back Up
Automatic Hard Drive Back Up
28-01-2008 1:29 PM
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Ok as the name suggests I am wanting to automatically back up my Hard Drive weekly, with a Freeware program not a Shareware program.
Watt I want it to do:
1) The program must be Free. No nags, no registration, just 100% free.
2) Back up all my files weekly.
3) The program must be easy to learn and use.
4) The program copies the data to a destination of my choice, where I can esaly access my backed up files any time I need to!
5) The program must only back up files if they were created or modified since the previous backup.
6) Built-in scheduler so that I can back up all my files weekly or daly.
7) The program must be able to work on Windows 98, ME, XP platforms.
Full logging to a text document if possible.
I do not want:
A program that compresses all files into one file.
Please do not tell me to doo a search on Google, I am Dyslexic and getting my text reader to read all of the information to me is a chore.
Re: Automatic Hard Drive Back Up
28-01-2008 2:57 PM
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Unless you are using Vista 64 bit then the version 2.0 beta would probably be better
It doesn't include a built in scheduler but Task Manager does that for you.
You need to set it to contribute so that it only backs up one way.
Re: Automatic Hard Drive Back Up
28-01-2008 4:42 PM
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This does exactly what you are looking for. It's a great automatic backup system.
https://mozy.com/
It doesn't do exactly what you were looking for as it backs up over the internet onto Mozy's servers but it does all your other requirements.
Re: Automatic Hard Drive Back Up
28-01-2008 6:25 PM
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Quote from: Oldjim [big snip] Use SynchToy
I don't like beta programs, they are buggy 9 times out of 10 plus the full version is for Windows Vista only.
Quote from: Nick [big snip] I use MozyHome. You get 2GB free and unlimited storage for $4.95 per month.
My last back up was last knite and the file size was 100 MB.
Re: Automatic Hard Drive Back Up
28-01-2008 7:08 PM
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Both are built in command line tools on the more recent versions of Windows, or are downloadable from Microsoft.
You can easily code a script to copy the files you want to external storage, piping any errors into a log file so you can check whats happened.
Anything that gets missed, you can easily locate and discover/rectify the problem.
Re: Automatic Hard Drive Back Up
28-01-2008 7:47 PM
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3) The program must be easy to learn and use.
Re: Automatic Hard Drive Back Up
28-01-2008 7:53 PM
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jelv (a.k.a Spoon Whittler) Why I have left Plusnet (warning: long post!) Broadband: Andrews & Arnold Home::1 (FTTC 80/20) Line rental: Pulse 8 Home Line Rental (£14.40/month) Mobile: iD mobile (£4/month) |
Re: Automatic Hard Drive Back Up
28-01-2008 8:01 PM
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Quote System Requirements
* Supported Operating Systems: Windows Vista; Windows XP
Microsoft .NET Framework v2.0
1GHz Intel P3 processor or equivalent
256MB RAM, 512MB RAM recommended
20MB free disk space
Re: Automatic Hard Drive Back Up
28-01-2008 8:04 PM
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Quote from: Nick This does exactly what you are looking for
Quote from: Nick It doesn't do exactly what you were looking for
sorry (no offence I mean) but this just made me laugh ...
Re: Automatic Hard Drive Back Up
29-01-2008 12:18 AM
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other than that you wont beat robocopy as suggested as once you have done the backup save it as a cmd file and it can mirror files back them up like a rocket and its free
all you need is something like
robocopy c:\ g:\backup *.* /e
backs up all c to g:\backup
Re: Automatic Hard Drive Back Up
29-01-2008 8:15 AM
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Quote from: Midnight James I said:
3) The program must be easy to learn and use.
It is easy to learn and use.
I understand you might not feel confident to dive in and have a go because of your dyslexia, but if you tell me what you want to back up, and where you want to back it up to, I can write the code for you and post it here for you to have a go.
An example of a script to copy your 'My Documents' folder to an external hard drive (assigned letter E:) would be;
xcopy "c:\Documents and Settings\Gary\My Documents" "E:\My Documents\" /E /V /C /I /Y >"C:\Documents and Settings\Gary\Desktop\Backup_Logfile.txt"
This would copy all files, and record a line in the log for each file that has been copied. If the script encountered an error, it would continue, but you'd have a line in the log file telling you of the error.
This particular script would overwrite the log file each time it ran.
All you'd need to do is create a batch file (I can help explain how to do this if you fancy giving this solution a try) then you add the batch file into scheduled tasks to run daily.
Not the prettiest solution, but it does do as you require. (For free, its a command thats been available since MS-DOS 6.0)
Re: Automatic Hard Drive Back Up
29-01-2008 9:15 AM
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Re: Automatic Hard Drive Back Up
29-01-2008 9:55 AM
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You'll get better performance by avoiding loading a gui into memory, you aren't subjecting your registry to having extra entries which need searching through any time your computer wants to do *anything*.
If you are more comfortable adding extra overheads to your machine, then yes, it could be that its more intuitive to use a GUI such as SyncToy, but you could very easily learn how to write your own script to acheive the same thing, in the same space of time it takes to download/install/learn the program.
I've dug out a handy link for the various parameters for xcopy, in case anybody is interested.
http://www.computerhope.com/xcopyhlp.htm
They also appear to have a fairly complete set of instructions and example code for many other command line tools for those who want to delve into the dark depths!
Re: Automatic Hard Drive Back Up
29-01-2008 10:15 AM
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