Microsoft Synctoy for backup

[YellowJersey]

For months I've been trying to find a way to get my external backup hard-drives synchronized without having to micromanage files manually. I stumbled across Synctoy from Microsoft which surprisingly fits my needs perfectly; it's exactly what I was looking for. Basically, you pick the source folder, the destination folder, and then it syncs the two folders exactly.

I tested it out on two little thumb drives before using it on my photo backups. It seems to work pretty well.

My biggest problem until now was trying to keep all the drives up to date and exactly the same, but it was frustrating trying to get them to match by just manually dragging and dropping folders around.

This pleases me.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

Synchronizing is not backing up. Any virus or damage gets synchronized as well, so you do not gain the security or a backup, or have a older set of files to recover from.

Most external drives come with a backup utility. Windows has a good one, but only in the premium edition.

What is best is to have multiple backups so you can go back to a time when the damaged file or virus, or whatever was not present. One way is to have multiple spare drives and rotate them so you always have say three older backups. Then, put them in different locations. A fire could destroy them all, or A thief might just take them along with your computer, so leave one with a friend or relative.

 

[YellowJersey]

I understand your point. I suppose I should have explained a bit more. Basically, I have my primary external, secondary external, and tertiary external. The primary and secondary get synced and hold everything while the tertiary holds only backups of RAW files and any finished products due to its smaller capacity. But before I sync the primary and secondary, and before I even plug the secondary drive in, I ALWAYS run a full scan looking for any viruses or anything suspicious. I just got the secondary external a few days ago, so I'm still looking at something to restore in the event that both drives crap out on me.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I use a NAS to synch to for file recovery, good synch is much better than synchtoy and has a ton of options including a backup which can be run manually.

Take a look at it. Its one of the easiest to use. I also creat system images occasionally using windows 7. I can restore my os, files, programs, etc in a few minutes. Then I can restore data backups after that.

 

[YellowJersey]

I'll check it out. Thanks a lot for the info.