Mirror, copy, sync... Folders/files

[TheMajor]

RAID is no backup.

 

[KSoD]

It can be considered a form of backup. It is a backup of your drive that you can put into place if your main drive dies. Either way dont really matter. Sync, Mirror, backup are all the same terms to do the same thing. Be able to get back up and running with minimal downtime. Which ever way you choose it all gets you to the same end point. Back up and running after some sort of failure without data loss.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

It can be considered a form of backup. It is a backup of your drive that you can put into place if your main drive dies. Either way dont really matter. Sync, Mirror, backup are all the same terms to do the same thing. Be able to get back up and running with minimal downtime. Which ever way you choose it all gets you to the same end point. Back up and running after some sort of failure without data loss.

RAID isn't really a backup because the only thing it protects against is disc failure. There are still plenty of other things that could cause you to lose data even when using RAID since anything happening on the main drive, such as data corruption, will instantly be mirrored to the other drive(s)

 

[cowboy]

Hello,
will synctoy, handle deletions, i.e., if I move/delete a file from a folder it will be deleted in the backup/mirrored folder.

I can do a simple xcopy and is great for backup/copying folders in general.

However, one issue is situations where you have a large amount of files, lets say pictures (lots of em).
The issue is this:
over time as you organize and re-organize them xcopy would leave you with
many duplicates, I think.
e.g., folderA has file1 which get copied, you then move it to folderB so now you have two file 1's etc...
Maybe I'm missing something, but under this example you could end up with many, many duplicates....

It seems like 'mirroring" is the best approach to this particular concern ?
in that when anything changed in folderA including a move/delete it would happen in the mirror.

 

[carnageX]

I used this site when I setup SyncToy at the place I used to work at for copying all of our computer's My Document folders to a network drive: PC ****: How to Use Microsoft SyncToy to backup your data

Modes supported:

Synchronize: New and updated files are copied both ways. Renames and deletes in one folder is repeated on the other.

Echo: New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames and deletes on the left are repeated on the right.

Subscribe: Updated files on the right are copied to the left is the file name already exists on the left.

Contribute: New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames on the left are repeated on the right. Similar to Echo, except there are no deletions.

Combine: New and updated files are copied both ways. Renamed and deleted files are ignored.

I always setup the jobs with the 'Combine' option, just in case something was deleted that wasn't supposed to be deleted.

After its setup, you can click 'change options' on the backup task, and select other individual folders for backup.

There's a way to setup automated backups through Task Schedular, but I can't remember off hand how to get it to work correctly (The one from that article isn't quite right with v2.1)

There's also Karen's Replicator (has built-in automation), which I've heard some good things about but have to yet try:
Karen's Replicator

 

[Jayce]

What about Syncback SE? It supports scheduling. I use it frequently on Windows systems.

RAID is no backup.

Sure it is. I run Raid 1 on my Linux systems. Two drives are in the array. If one drive dies, the other remains running. Sure, it's not a hard copy backup, but it is definitely a form of a backup, as Drive B will continue to retain data, function, and operate even if Drive A dies.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

^it's not backup, it's redundancy. i.e. if you delete a file, you can't retrieve it from the other drive like you could in a backup situation.

 

[Jayce]

^it's not backup, it's redundancy. i.e. if you delete a file, you can't retrieve it from the other drive like you could in a backup situation.

Well, that's a good point. I still look at redundancy as a means of backup, though. But the ability to retrieve a deleted file is a bit of a different story then.