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I need some help, direction so I can ask some basic questions.

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I will try and state my goal first and someone can tell me I can't do it with the Acronis package I bought.  I have loaded the backup software on a new desktop with two large hard drives.  I have copied my large photo data file on my laptop onto a USB hard drive that I want to move back and forth between the two machines for editing and what I want is for the backup software to compare the transport drive with the backup it has stored and add any new images that have been added to the transport drive to the back up file automatically.  I have given up on the idea that the backup file will be a simple viewable file as it seems Acronis will only build a compressed and encrypted file which is not what I thought it would do.  Please help this backup challenged guy out if you can.  Thanks in advance.  

 

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Hi John,

Unfortunatley, Acronis (and other backup software) is not intended for what you're looking for.  However, I have a suggestion/solution that includes Acronis as well.

Backups are very important.  They take a snapshot in time of the data on your drives as they currently live.  That way, if your drive fails, or there's a fire, theft, etc., hopefully you can revert to a backup with minimal, or no data loss.  It's often recommended that you keep 3 copies of your data - the original, an onsite backup and an offsite backup as a tiered approach to disaster recovery.

For what you want to do, it sounds like you really want to "sync" the same data in multiple places so that it's replicated for redundancy.  This is another great idea, but keep in mind it's not a backup as the data can always be modified, whereas a backup is, again, a snapshot of all the data at that point in time that you can revert back to.

So, I would suggest that you use Acronis to continue backing up your data - you probably only need to backup one of the large drives if the content wilil be the same.  This is your safetynet and recovery points in case synching overwrites the wrong copy, or you have a drive failure or some kind of disaster. 

And, in addition to your backup, I would consider using a synching software to replicate your working data to both drives.  I use a free product called "allwaysync" which does exactly what you want.  You can set it to replicate in just one direction (say from 1 drive always to the other), or in both directions (say in case you work on drive one and want the data copied to drive 2, but then you work on drive 2 and want those changes copied to drive 1 and vice-versa).  The free version is probably fine, but does limit the number of syncs you can do in a certain period of time.  Perhaps try it out and see what you think and if you do find that the free version is a bit too limited then there are other options.  There are definitely other products out there that sync as well, but I can recommend allwaysync as I use it myself. 

Hope that helps.