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Backing up a hard drive

T

thilanliyan

Lifer
Is there a backup program that will sort of "sync" your backup drive with your main drive? What I mean exactly is...is there a program that will update the necessary files and delete the necessary files in a preexisting backup?
 
I believe that whatever secondary hard drive you bought will have software to do it. If not check WD's site for their backup utility. Another option is Acronis True Image. It's not free but it's good.
 
if the drives are attached via sata/esata i'm pretty sure the intel matrix storage manager can do a "sync". i know my ICH9R has this feature. its not raid-1; it's a on-demand (as in you tell it to go) and it does a mirror of your main drive. you can keep on using it and when it finishes it tells you so.

i'd assume with an esata this would be a (free) solution to snap your machine.

symantec backup exec system restore 8.5 is a good program ($$) and vmware converter[free] (if you know the know) can also do hot vss-aware backups.

 
I use MS Synctoy for this. It has different syncing options, one of which replicates changes (including deletes) on the source drive to the backup drive.

The documentation states that it has problems with NAS devices, but assuming your backup drive is local it should work fine. I've been using it for 2 years, under both XP32 and Vista64.

 
For Linux, I've heard a lot of good things about rsync, though I claim no personal experience. The Windows equivalent would be cwrsync. I used to use Foldershare and then Windows Live Sync, but those don't prevent against accidental deletions. I once accidentally deleted a folder and within a few seconds it was deleted on my backup. From what I've been told, cwrsync (and probably many other programs) could be set up to only sync at the end of the day. More of what I have heard, rsync/cwrsync have very fast algorithms for only sending the differences, so syncing is fast. Anyway, I'm ditching RAID 1 on my current system and going to try cwrsync (once I get this idiotic Samsung drive sent back, by the way, how come Samsung's support could not find the HD103UJ/any Spinpoint F drive, I'm using this website.)
 
Would love something like the OP posted.

As for the backup programs mentioned - I don't think that is what the OP looks for.
They 'back up' the disk into a proprietary file. It sounds like the OP (like me) is looking for a sync program, which syncs the contents of a disk to an external HDD.
All the files on the external HDD are the same as on the original disk ... and the external HDD can be hooked up and used with another computer.

MS Synctoy works somewhat like this ... but it has issues with Win7, so it's a no-go for me at least.
 
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