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Advanced backup software? Backup changes data/bits only...

B

bobn4burton

Gawd
Joined
Aug 19, 2002
Messages
722
OK,
I've searched and there are lots of threads on backup software recommendations. But I didn't see any that talked about what I need.

I backup all my important data over the net through a VPN (openvpn) to a remote pc. I've tried synctoy and robocopy. Both work great within their limitations. For mostly 'stagnant' files, either solution has worked great for me in the past.

Now...for larger, 'dynamic' files these two programs start to fall short. If I have a bunch of larger files that change regularly, using either robocopy or synctoy you'd have to re-transfer/overwrite these large files for even the tiniest change.

Is there any software out there that can do a smarter backup where it only has to transfer the data changed in a file instead of the whole file? So if you have a 100meg file with a small change, it would only actually have to transfer 500k over the net of changed data instead of transferring/overwriting the whole 100meg file?

I've never used Mozy (or similar) but I believe they have this ability (correct me if I'm wrong)? They can also store previous versions, which i'm sure would just be the whatever specific data was changed...as they wouldn't store complete copies of older rev files...

If what I'm looking for doesn't make sense, I'll try to explain better.

Bottom line, I have a bunch of somewhat larger files that change minimally on a near daily basis. I'd like to backup these files each night and would like to save bandwidth and NOT have to copy the complete set of files over and over again when they have only minimally changed...

Thanks for any help in advance!
 
Finding something that does file-level might be simpler to work with, and likely more space efficient.

I've been looking at this on linux, and the two major programs are Bacula and Amanda - though that might be overkill for your application.
 
Top of my head, Super Flexible File Synchronizer and Altaro Oops Backup both do delta copying - the former being more for syncing files between two folders and the latter being closer to traditional backup software and storing multiple archival copies.
 
The answer for this is ZFS send & receive. The best thing with ZFS is that its very easy to restore all your data. No need to loop through all incremental backup(snapshots).
 
ZFS is a file system.....not a backup application.
 
How does that help with remote transfer of data over the internet? I guess if you had a ZFS box locally and one in a remote site then you can use this method.
 
You can (AFAIK) zfs send and redirect the output to a file somewhere. Note also that zfs snapshots in combination with something like rsync makes a great backup mechanism.
 
Thanks for the input so far. Right now I'm looking at three different options:

1. Deltacopy/Syncrify
2. Altaro
3. Backup4all

Any other options?
 
Recommend SuperFlexible Synchronizer. It has delta copying and supports sftp. Plus, you can have it run scripts before or after backup if necessary and you can have it run portable; meaning that you can store the program and it's database files on the backup drive itself and run it from there. It supports VSS, so you can have it do backups while you use your files.

By the way, I use SuperFlexible to backup over sftp to my offsite server. The server is off. I have a WOL script that turns on the server and waits for a successful ping before SuperFlexible runs the backup. Since my connection more than capable of multiple simultaneous transfers and my server is more than capable of sustaining multiple transfers, I have SuperFlexible copy files 4 to 20 at a time depending on which directory it is working on.
 
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