Help with backups

[thefourthwall]

Hello,

I need some wisdom on how to better do backups at a local church office.

I've got about 12 GB of data and so far had been doing complete copies to an external hard drive. This is not the best way to do it, but a year ago it was all I knew to do.

So now I have several copies of the data, with most of the files being 0duplicated in other folders.

To reduce a lot of wasted space because of so many duplicate files, is there an effective way to get rid of the duplicates while keeping the changed files? I thought about WinDiff to eliminate the dupes, but am not sure if this is the best way to go... help is appreciated.

Going forward, would a tool like Second Copy 7 be more effective than, say the built-in backup utility in XP Pro?

Thanks for your wisdom,

thefourthwall

 

[BadBigBen]

have a read, as to what types of backup would come into play:

Which Backup Modes to use

http://www.orionsoftlab.com/backup/incremental backup.htm

What's the difference between differential and incremental backups (and why should I care)?

http://www.acronis.com/resource/solutions/backup/2005/incremental-backups.html

then I can only suggest you get a backup software such as Acronis True Image...

alternatively you could image the drive, once a day and then deleting the previous week day, e.g. Image Saturday 31 Jan. and delete the Image from Saturday the 24th., this would ensure that you have a full backup with redundancy (in case one of the images does not function as it should) that can be reimaged to a new (or the old drive) when a crash occurs...

before you decide, wait for others to give their opinions...

Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.

 

[edfair]

I use PCBACKUP to do a daily backup of files and a group of batch files to transfer the backup from the place where it originally went to put it into a revolving daily queue. That gives me a minimum of 4 days of backups in the system on another disk.

The original backup goes into a current directory around 7 PM then is transferred to the daily queues at 4 AM. Another server grabs the backup at 12:59 AM.

The backup program can compress stuff down. I use that at 11 PM to burn a DVD, taking about 4Gb down to probably 1.5.

If I seem paranoid, so be it.

I also do the same thing with Unix boxes for 6 customers. Just a different program and considerably smaller drivs.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.