UKC

The old fella has seen Carbon Copy Cloner on my Mac and fancies something like that to keep a seperate cache of his photos on an external HDD. Can any of the PC experts recommend a free incremental backup tool for the PC. Basically he'll be wanting to just copy his "My Photos" folder and all it's contents so the ability to copy selected folders on his internal HDD would be handy.


Thanks

In reply to Removed User: Microsoft have a free program called Synctoy which seems to do the job

In reply to Removed User:

One option I use for extra backup is Mozy - it's a web based backup you get 2Gb free so may not be enough for an entire my photos folder but is useful for email and offsite storage of important files. You download a client program, select the folders to backup. It takes a couple of hours to do the first full backup then does a daily backup when your machine is idle of what's changed in those folders.

If the worst comes to the worst then you could just use xcopy You can set up a batch file(and associated desktop icon) to do incremental backups.

xcopy source_dir destination /M /S /Q /Y /V

M is incremental backup
S is copy subdirectories
Q is quiet mode
Y is overwrite existing files with same name
V is verify the write

You can also exclude certain subdirectories by using /EXCLUDE:dir_1+dir_2

An example: /EXCLUDE:base+fred+.bak will exclude all files in base and fred directories and all backup files.

HTH

ALC

In reply to Removed User: Microsoft have a free utility called robocopy which we use to synchronize our computers at home.

In reply to Removed User:

Can recommend SyncBack from here -

http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html

Is free and will do almost anything that is ever wanted including automatic and incremental backups. No problems and have used it for years.

Steve

In reply to 4712topo:

There's a lot out there that will do what is required, but I can also recommend SyncBack. It's free and very easy to use, which I think is important when doing backups because if it isn't easy then you end up not being bothered to do the backup.

In reply to Removed User:
Cheers guys I'll have a look at these programmes. Good to hear that they are simple as I don't want my Dad delving into the guts of the PC or another Sunday will be ruined!!

Thanks again.