Best way to back up a lot of data, advice, anyone?
OK: win7 64-bit computer, 8 cpu's, 16G ram, 250 G SSD C: drive. 1T raid(0) scratch drive F:, 2T raid (1) data drive G:, 2 T external drive (for backups) with an eSATA connection H:. ATIH 2014 version 17.0.01646.
The data drive, G:, has about 760G of data. If I set up a regular backup , full + x incrementals, I very quickly run out of space. I tried sync, seemed to work but ran constantly. It did not impact throughput, but the drives never stopped going and going and going. Plus I was re-organizing some music folders and it jumped in and replaced a bunch of stuff I had just deleted and it duplicated some other folders for no apparent reason. I tried file/folder backups - worked for the small word processing and spreadsheet folders, but when I tried for the large video, still pictures, and music folders it told me it would take 5 days 1 hour and 12 minutes. I don't think so. So I cancelled that.
I am currently trying a drive backup with a single full version. A mere 2 hours 26 minutes. I guess I can live with this provided the single version works OK and deletes old versions the way it is supposed to.
Any advice, boys and girls?
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I backup the music files with Robocopy, free with every version of Windows, which creates file-based backups rather than compressed archives. I created a batch file that runs Robocopy, comparing my music files with the current mirrored backup and then backing up only those new or changed, and deleted any that I deleted from the source. Robocopy is multi-threaded, and I specify the use of 16 threads, so it's quite fast especially on USB 3.0.
Robocopy is a robust file-based backup tool. Once a Robocopy script is written, I just reuse it by launching a .bat file (which could also be scheduled). I mirror my media partition to external HDs, and Robocopy is fast because it will backup only the changes and it is multi-threaded.
Robocopy is particularly fast on a multi-processor-CPU system when set to mirror, so it backs up only those files that have changed or which are new. My music folder has over 2,400 sub-folders with over 21,000 files, and setting Robocopy to use 16 threads lets it compare everything in very little time.
It's a command-line tool, but it's very easy to write the short commands needed, and plenty of good tutorial sites to show you how. It requires little learning, really quite easy.
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