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Any suggestions for an easy, incremental file backup application?

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Sizzler:
For years I've either: (a) lost files due to hard drive crashes or (b) manually backed up email and documents by burning them to DVD

My backup 'system' is no system at all, except that every once in a while I decide I should back stuff up, and then I manually copy a whole bunch of folders and files into a DVD project and burn it.   I really need a better way to do this.  I'd like a backup system which only backed-up 'new' or 'changed' files (so I'm not backing up the exact same files over and over) and does it regularly and or more systematically and efficiently.

I have hard drives lying around as well as external enclosures, but I think I'd rather just back up to DVD although it seems like backing up to DVD would mean that the process wasn't happening in the background like it could with a hard drive.

Any suggestions that are relatively easy, don't require me to set up a linux backup server or anything like that, and might do what I want?   I lose hard drives every year or so to some kind of failure and know this is something I should be doing, I just don't know the best or easiest way to do it.
Thanks

ahofle:
Norton Ghost seems to work pretty well.  I have it setup at work to create a 'base' backup once a week or so, and then incremental backups for changes nightly.  It's probably best to backup to an extra harddrive rather than DVD though.  Maybe you could benefit from this killer deal in another thread for your backups:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=71317.0

patrickl:
To automatically protect against harddrive failure a RAID system works great. The simplest would be mirroring. If either drive breaks the other still holds all your data. Works in the background and it works all the time. My file server is an Infrant ReadyNAS with 4 disks. that works even better than mirroring, but it's seriously expensive.

Then there is the backup against accidental file deletes or bad changes. For this I use rdiff on FreeBSD (nightly cron job). This makes daily backups of all changed files. Depends a bit on how much I change, but so far I have been able to have it backup enough so that I can roll back changes for a month. I can go back to every version of a file I had over the last month. Haven't been able to get this to work in a Windows environment though.

You should really also make proper backups to prevent against total loss (like fire and theft and such). I use removable harddisks for that.

Actually this ties in with the first backup solution. I have a built in drive unit that takes two disks, but to the PC it acts as one disk. They are mirrored so both are identical. They are also hot swappable so I just swap out a disk now and then and move it off-site and in the safe. It's a bit pricey, but I like the comfort it provides. Deonet backup

When I feel like it I also will make backups on DVD, but DVDs just don't take enough data to make a proper backup. So this is never automated.

jbox:
Basically if you want incremental backups you need the software to hunt down and find out which files have been changed. Which is a task which is not complicated but fiddly. If you don't want to do a full *NIX install then install something like Cygwin or some other sub-distribution of Cygwin that just installs the basic tools without all the extra gnu/linux software.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils
http://www.cygwin.com/

Since the Windows environment by default discourages people from this kind of 'quick n dirty' scripting I can't say I've ever come across any reasonable toolkit for Windows that wasn't either expensive, just a port of the tools from *NIX, or some vaguely dubious add-on from MS designed to push you over to .Net or whatever their latest gimmick is.

Once you have a decent shell and the base *NIX tools installed you can either download or knock out differently sized nightly/weekly/monthly snapshot backup scripts in under a couple of hours. If that kind of stuff is all voodoo to you, then you're better off just buying whatever Norton (or similar) sells to do that instead.  :dunno

2600:
Syncback works well and there is a free edition if you want to try it out.

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