PC software that can do Incremental backups?

V

VanEck

Weaksauce
Joined
Apr 30, 2007
Messages
84
Hello all. I recently purchased a WD 500gig My Book ES external USB drive to backup all of my data on my PC.

At the moment, I back everything up every couple of weeks by simply dragging/dropping the folders and files onto the external, overwriting the old data. This process can take several hours and isn't really necessary because only small amounts of data have actually changed since the last backup.

I was wondering if anyone could recommend some good, easy to use software that I can use to perform incremental backups? This would save me a few hours worth of time if I had software that could see which files have changed, and only overwrite them as opposed to overwriting everything like I am currently doing :eek:

Thanks.
 
acronis is pretty decent i use it at work, paragon drive backup is ok too.
 
Acronis is fine as long as you are not backing up to CD or DVD. I have had horrible issues since version 8.

Backup to HDD or FTP works flawlessly..
 
I use XXCOPY. I create a .bat file in the root of the backup drive, then run it whenever I want to backup my files. It's easy, simple, one file, no bulky programs to install.
 
I am going to go against the Arconis recommendation here.

I have Arconis V9 and while I use it at times to image my entire hard drive it is not great for incremental back ups. In fact most imaging software I would suggest against.

Arconis and most imaging software will capture your incremental changes to a seperate file. The file structure for Arconis is believe is a .tib file. So you have a .tib file as your back up and every week say you have an incremental change that gets saved as a seperate file.

The problem with this is that after about a year of use you have tons of incremented files that work fine when you load up Arconis or the boot disk...until one of the incremented files gets corrupted and therefore screws the whole back up from restoring forcing you to start over the back up process.

A more painless & free solution that I use is SyncBack. All I do is create a folder for my back up on my storage drive and set it to back up all the files in the My Documents folder. There are many tutorials on how to set up SyncBack to increment files. It is painless and does not slow the system to a crawl when it increments changes. Plus it gives me reports after each back up.
 
You shouldn't use incremental backup for more then 5-7 backups after the full backup was taken. Also Acronis can concatenate incremental backups into 1 file so all you will have is 1 full backup and 1 incremental backup.
Not that I'm big advocate for acronis or other commercial software, but I do use Acronis at work to backup all the important workstations and to make clone images.
At home i use rsync for windows.
 
If you want to be cheap, just use the built in windows backup software. It works well and is free, I use it to keep my business data backed up to an external drive myself.
 
i just keep my finger on the "n" button when windows asks me if i want to overide a file... saves hours :D
 
+1 for Acronis True Image.

It does incremental and differential backups (which backs up only the files that changed since the first complete backup). You can browse the .tib and restore single file, etc. And it does live imaging for fast disaster recovery.

If you can do without incrementals etc, there's a free version available for users of Maxtor or Seagate HDs: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39779


And btw, Windows Backup utility does incrementals too, and you already have that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top