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Well I'd like to have shared some ....

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george7987:
Forget Easeus Todo Backup, a restore of my system disk left the system unable to boot. Lucky I had made both a Todo and Acronis image before I tried a restore.

george7987:
See my attached SyncToy automation script at the bottom of this topicWell I've progressed on this. I've done a fair amount of testing under volume and network situations, and have come to the following conclusions.

Still like OopsBackup for its reverse delta approach, its simplicity and its use of Windows Shadow Copy against volatile data like accounts and email data, but like most products, it is not the silver bullet....yet...(remember this is a new product evolving quickly). But I still find it the best for time sliced backups of volatile data where versioning is required, which should be against any changing data, because Syncs will only propogate corruptions to your backup copy in changing data.

My single concern is it's behaviour against volume data where files and folders are renamed and moved. This I think is a common scenario against pictures, videos and music on the 'home pc' as people organize and rename pictures and video from the location / name applied when downloaded from the camera, and later when organizing such material into collections / albums.

What I have found is that it does not adequately handle these three actions, namely:

* rename of file
* rename of folder
* move folderin the case of volume data.

It treats them as would happen for a delete/add. In order to maintain it's 'timeline' information, i.e. versions under the old name/location up to the time of the action and under the new name/location after the time of the action, it is currently doing this with new copies of the files in the backup repository as required with the new names/locations, or history copies under the old names/locations.

In other words, with these three actions, there is redundant storage of the data itself to represent these actions while the data itself has not actually changed at all. This is not really consequential for small volume volatile data where the volumes have no significant effect, and an extra version generated amongst the expected historical versions does not change the expected storage volumes anyway,  but with GB video / picture files where it is not expected that the data will change in the first place, the extra versions / copies put into the repository to represent the timeline snapshots has a significant impact on the volume stored in the backup repository.

In my case as I moved and renamed large video files around, the backup repository just grew to the point that I could not afford to cover this material with OopsBackup.

So I looked to a Sync solution to cover my videos, pictures and music, and to duplicate the backup repository on two external drives, and trialled GoodSync and Synctoy to see if they had the same problem. To my supprise, GoodSync did the same as OopsBackup and was a pain to select a data transfer speed for each pair that maximized performance but didn't interfer with the PC's other running applications, whereas very supprisingly, the free SyncToy Ver 2.1 based on Microsoft Sync Framework 2.0, worked perfectly against the three actions listed above.

I ran two tests, the first renamed a folder that contained a 7GB vodeo mpg file. The second then moved that folders parent folder to another location on the disk and that parent folder contained a total of 18GB of files.

SyncToy 2.1 completed both tests in 13 SECONDS, performing the same operations on the destination synced drive (these are Echo Syncs by the way), whereas OopsBackup with it's need to copy data, took 8 minutes for the first test, and 18 minutes for the second test, and this against an attached USB 2.0 drive, not even across a network.

So, if you don't want versioniong, look to SyncToy 2.1. Its easy to setup, but not automated. My approach to that has been to setup another administrative user to run SyncToy, use RunAs to create the pairs definitions and perform the initial sync with SyncToy itself, and then use SyncToyCmd (I think this might be new to Ver 2.1 if you're not familiar with it, not really sure) to run the pairs under that user from Windows Scheduler, and then to start that off in low priority as well. So, I don't see the SyncToy jobs run, they run in Low priority so don't interfer with me, and there you are.

I have two external drives, H:\ and Q:\, and I sync my three data drives E:\, F:\, and G:\ (an all up total of about 115GB) to both those external drives. Attached is my script run from Scheduler (at login and then every two hours) as Administrator to achieve this if you are interested. Don't forget to also run Synctoy as Administrator in the first place to setup the pairs and perform the initial sync.

So, my backup strategy for the moment now stands at:
1) use AJC Active backup to create realtime versions at every save of a file, these only kept for a couple of days, to protect me from human and system errors/crashes.
2) use OopsBackup for all volatile data, especially where open files are required to be backed up as well
3) use SyncToy 2.1 for volume non-volatile data like Pictures/video/music
4) sync everything to two external drives, one removed off site and returned every week or two
5) and yes, despite loathing it's dominance at the head of every editors review list of backup software, because it isn't, I use Acronis for imaging the system disk only, which is not covered by any other backup.

Hope everyone is virus free.....cheers

JavaJones:
Interesting info. Thanks for the thorough breakdown of your tests! I'm about to setup some semi-complex sync and backup systems for a client and this should be useful info. :)

- Oshyan

george7987:
You're welcome....

If someone knows of one of the commercial sync programs that performs as well as Synctoy in regards the actions I spoke of, and has automation and runs in low priority...let me know.

Armando:
Great info. Thank you.

I didn't know SyncToy was that fast and clever. Very good to know.

Note that SyncBackSe has a feature called SmartSync. It can also detect file renames.

However I haven't tested these features extensively and I don't know how much they accelerate data syncing. I might do some tests in the future because I'm dissatisfied with the absence of "Delta" backup in SyncBackSe and I might be looking for another solution this year. This is SyncBackSe only real draw back, IMO (well there are others... But they don't bother me too much).

Of course it would be nice if it could also image, and do what OopsBackup and AJC Active backup do too (there's also MirrorFolder which f0dder chose for is job a while ago -- I wonder if he still uses it. It seemed like a neat app).

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