Looking for the Best Backup Solution

[Lazywolf]

Hello everyone, it's been a while since I've posted here!

I'll cut to the chase: I'm looking for the best solution when it comes to backing up one hard drive on my system to an external drive. All it needs to be able to do is make an exact copy of all the data I specify on the external disk, be able to detect any file changes, and update to the most recent version of each every time a backup is performed. Any other features are a plus, but if it doesn't do these two things well, it won't work for me.

It's surprising how hard it is to find software that does just that; for example, the built-in Windows 7 backup utility is completely useless to me because it moves all the files around into a seemingly random configuration of folders so it's impossible to find anything. I tried it once; I'd perform regular backups with that utility, but then manually make a copy of all my files as well. Wouldn't 'ya know it; when it came time to restore the backup, Windows gave some random error and failed to restore my files! So glad I didn't trust it with my data and had an actual copy to restore from.

I currently use Mozy which gives me off-site, online backup with the option of saving on a local disk as well, but honestly I've been less than pleased with them and would rather have something I don't have to pay for on a yearly basis. I've looked at this list on Wikipedia, but without any kind of context it's hard to see which best meets my needs.

What's your experience been with backup software? Anything you'd recommend?

(OS is Win7 64 bit Pro. I'd be interested in either open-source or proprietary software, whichever does the best job).

[Steve R Jones]

SyncBack is a flexible, and quite powerful backup and synchronization program that allows to to maintain backup copies of your files and folder, or to synchronize them, so that both locations always have a complete copy (e.g Laptop/PC). It offers different types of actions that let you choose how older and newer files are processed, which files should be excluded (by mask) and more. It offers standard file comparison based on the date and size, as well as optional MD5 checksum, which will detect even the slightest modifications to files. SyncBack also supports scheduled projects, FTPand zip compression of backups, as well as network login, simulation runs and more.

SyncBack

The paid version is even more powerful.

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

I find that just using robocopy works pretty well...the only thing I'd have issues with (if I ran it at home as a backup solution, rather than Backup Exec on/from my server) would be due to me using multiple computers..

I've got it running at work, albeit in multiple instances and just use Task Scheduler to kick off the BAT script that runs them...

For example:
robocopy C:\F@H\ D:\Backups\F@H\ /MIR > D:\Log.txt

That would use robocopy to MIRror anything that is in C:\F@H\ to D:\Backups\F@H\ and generate a Log.txt at the root of D:\ for you to review..

This would replicate from the source any changes that were made, delete any files that you had removed and any files that were moved or renamed, all to the location of the duplicate/backup destination location.

If you wanted to run that as a script (for example, for the Task Scheduler to run at predetermined intervals) then you can save that line to a notepad file, then rename the file extension from .TXT to .BAT and you can also add extra lines to the BAT file to get other locations to be mirrored.

For example:
robocopy C:\F@H\ D:\Backups\F@H /MIR > D:\F@HLog.txt
robocopy C:\Users\ D:\Backups\Users /MIR > D:\UsersLog.txt
robocopy C:\Inetput\ D:\Backups\Inetpub /MIR > D:\InetpubLog.txt

[Lazywolf]

SyncBack was perfect; it did everything I wanted, and did it well! Thank you so much for suggesting that!