Have I purchased the wrong software

1. You can do mirroring with ATI, but not to multiple drives. Also, mirroring is not ATI's primary purpose.

2. With ATI, you can create full disk images of your entire boot drive. If your drive ever fails. you can restore the latest image and be back in business without needing to install Windows and install all your applications again, as well as having all your data intact.

3. If all you want is to copy data files, such as photos, you can do it with ATI but ATI is not necessary. You could use other software that would store the backups in their native file formats.

4. The standard Windows copy and past to another drive is not ideal for large volumes of critical files that you don't want to lose. It doesn't provide for post-copy error checking, so you don't know if something didn't copy properly which does happen. Also, when you want to update with new images, you'd have to manually figure out which ones are new, or copy also ones that aren't new.

For such file-backup tasks, I like Microsoft's Robocopy which is free with Windows. You must write a command line to make it do what you want, but it's easy and powerful. It's multi-threaded, so even with large file sets it runs quickly and will copy over only the files that are new or changed, if that's what you desire. I backup my music collection (over 30,000 large lossless files, about 500 GB) to two external HDs using Robocopy and a command line I wrote. I also use ATI to image my entire system, for disaster recovery.

Many thanks for your reply Tuttle.

Your idea for Microsoft Robocopy sounds good although I have read some reports of missing data. That is why I thought ATI would be the better option.

When you say mirroring, can I mirror specific folders, for example on my G Drive my images are stored in my headline folder My Pictures. Lets say day one I have all my images on the G Drive in folder My Pictures. I then mirror My Pictures onto a clean H Drive and then do a further mirror onto the clean I Drive.

My wish is then after adding more images to the G Drive, and maybe doing adjustments to previous images already stored on the drive, is to do an incremental mirror of the G Drive onto the H and I Drives, at the same time keeping the native file format. This does not need to done simultaneously.

My reason for keeping images is on my G Drive, is when I am travelling I can download images via my laptop straight on the G Drive. My H & I Drives would always stay at home and be a mirror of the G drive before I go on my travels. As a safeguard I would also keep a copy of my travel images on my laptop until they are backed up to my H Drive.

I am sorry if this all sounds a bit long winded. If at the end of the day it is not possible to do what I want with ATI I will have to look elsewhere and just use ATI for the disaster recovery.

Some further information about my pc configuration.

C- Drive 240GB SSD SATA-600 OPERATING SYSTEM

D- Drive 240GB SSD SATA-600 SCRATCH DISC

E – Drive 1TB SSHD DATA DISK

G – Drive 2TB EXTERNAL HD “Photo Library”

H – Drive 2TB EXTERNAL HD “Photo Library Backup”

I - Drive 2TB EXTERNAL HD “Photo Library Archive”

Any more info you have would be most welcome.

Many thanks

George

You cannot "store an incremental mirror". That makes no sense. Mirroring makes an exact copy of the data set.

I have not heard of Robocopy missing data. What does that even mean? Please provide a link to a reference.

Robocopy won't do a constant mirroring of immediately copying a new or changed file to the backup drive. Robocopy does its thing only when run. You can run manually or you can schedule tasks to run Robocopy automatically.

Yes, you could backup just specified folders. In your command line you tell Robocopy what to copy, how you want it copied, how many processor threads to use, whether to alter file attributes, etc.

You can do incremental images using ATI, just as you can do differential images and full images. Drive/partition images are stored in ATI's .tib archive format.

Hi Tuttle
Many thanks for your valuable information. I have come to the conclusion that ATI is not the product for my application. I have done a bit more research and I will probably go with Sync Back Pro which offer a lot of features that I do not really need, but will enable me to Sync my various drive, in the way I have described.

The issues with Robocopy came from my Google search which highlighted the problem.

Many thanks again

George

There are many forums discussing Robocopy, as it's a common tool included with all versions of Windows. Having researched it myself, I can tell you that some sites and forums provide opinion that is not true. One popular Windows forum has a long-time poster who often posts how Robocopy can cause data to be deleted from the source, which is absolute nonsense. So, don't assume all that you read is true. Robocopy is a robust copying and syncing tool, used by many power users.

Sync Back will do what you want. Just be aware that if your Windows drive crashes and fails. Sync Back will not help you get a working system back. You would need to install Windows from scratch and install all your applications again. ATI guards against such a scenario. I use both ATI and Robocopy, both excellent tools for different goals.

Hi Tuttle

I take your point about rouge information on the net.

I will still use ATI to back up my C Drive and I will use SyncBack Pro to do the mirror copy of my Data drives etc.

Once again many thanks for your help.

George