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IDEA: app which creates instant backup of any file you save in excel

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dwilbank:
Believe me, I've looked at Mr. Excel macros galore and several backup programs.
Couldn't find any that will do this, although it has to be a simple job for the right programmer.

I'm just looking for something that will dump a backup excel file to a predetermined location, regardless of where we choose to save the main file.
We save excel files all over our network drives, but would like to have a local place where copies go, automatically.

Obviously, people might want to use it for files other than .xls, but having a filter to copy JUST excel files is what I would need.

Is this harder than I think?

Thanks

skwire:
Is this harder than I think?-dwilbank (September 18, 2009, 02:40 PM)
--- End quote ---

Yes and no.  There are a lot of variables at play here.  Off the top of my head:

1) Does everybody use the same network drive i.e. there is only one network drive?
2) Are all XLS files saved to the network drive?  What about XLS files saved on a user's local computer?
3) How to handle version history of the copied XLS files, if any?
4) How to handle filename collisions?  Does each user get their own subfolder in the destination folder, etc.?
5) ...

There is potential for a large amount of complexity here depending on what you're after.  I suppose what I'm getting at is that you're going to need to provide a lot more in the way of specifics.

tranglos:
I'm just looking for something that will dump a backup excel file to a predetermined location, regardless of where we choose to save the main file.
We save excel files all over our network drives, but would like to have a local place where copies go, automatically.
-dwilbank (September 18, 2009, 02:40 PM)
--- End quote ---

Have you considered any of the real-time backup applications? They monitor any folders you specify (could be the whole drive, but check for performance before you commit) and any time a file is changed, it gets copied to another folder, usually with a timestamp. You could try FileHamster (more advanced options, more resource usage) or AJC Active Backup (fewer options, much leaner). You can configure either program to backup Excel files only, or whatever other types of files you wish.

Of course, check whether any program you choose supports monitoring network drives. This may not always work, and may depend on the network architecture or maybe filesystems used on the networked drives. I'm a little fuzzy on the particulars here, but I've found out in my programming adventures that standard change notifications APIs don't seem to work for (some?) network drives. Worst case, you could write a script that combs through all network drives every so often and makes backups of any new Excel files it finds. Most standard (not real-time) backup apps will happily do that out of the box.

And incidentally, Excel happens to be one of the hardest cases for real-time backup, due to an incomprehensibly(*) weird behavior. When you open an .xls file, Excel immediately changes its date/time to "now" and changes a few bytes in the header. If you close the file without making any modification, Excel restores the original timestamp, but the changed bytes remain. Now, to a backup program, it looks like the file has changed twice, even though you haven't touched it at all. So some backup programs will make two new copies of every Excel doc that you open. This isn't a tragedy, but it's wasted disk space. As far as I can tell, of the two apps mentioned above, FileHamster has some special code for Excel files and doesn't make those unnecessary copies of unchanged files. AJC on the other hand lets itself be fooled by Excel and does store surplus colpies of unmodified xls files.

(*) I have no idea why Excel could possibly be doing that. If it's to tamper-proof files, it's laughably easy to defeat - but it does defeat regular backup strategies. Go figure.

AndyM:
We save excel files all over our network drives, but would like to have a local place where copies go, automatically.
-dwilbank (September 18, 2009, 02:40 PM)
--- End quote ---

I know you said you looked at a VBA solution but since you are only needing this when running Excel, it would be simplest to deal with it as part of the File Save process.  You could write a simple script that would both save the file normally and then copy that file to a specific location.  Assign it to Ctrl-S and/or a toolbar button and/or a menu choice.

dwilbank:
I could certainly use a simple script that would intercept the Ctrl-S or the F12 Save As command...
(Now I know this is starting to sound like spyware, but I only want it to provide backups for all our work on all our shifts -- without having to change the workflow at all.)

My computer is the only one that creates these specific XLS files, and we always write to the same network drive.
We write to a different folder every day though, (new folders are created for every job we do) and I only want MY XLS files to be backed up... not everyone else's - which is why I can't use a standard folder monitoring app.

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