[MarkD]

Following purchase of a new 250gb external harddrive to improve backups of both my home and work PC's, I wanted to be able to synchronize folders easily and quickly. To that I end I found Microsoft Powertoys Synctoy HERE

Been using it for a couple of weeks and I have to say I am impressed by it. thought some of you guys maybe interested in having a look at it as well.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Thanks for the link, I will certainly be looking into it.

You can never be too paranoid about backing up data

[Mike]

Should I not save straight to my external drive then?? Because i've got no personal stuff on my computers hard drive, its all on my external

[Ziddy1232]

[MarkD]

I don't copy the whole drive with this software that would be a bloody nightmare .

I am not exactly sure how that would work either, because you can set up your c drive has a folder and copy, but when you run the sync it would only copy files that have been added or overwritten since the last sync was done.

However, I would imagine that system files in use would conflict with this. Although it is possible to preview the sync and exclude any files that conflict.

For our purposes this is now on all employees PC's at work, we have a policy that all your files are saved in either my documents or shared documents. We also have a database that needs to be backed up daily and weekly.

So now everyone has to run two folder pairs that I have set up on each PC everyday. These take about 2 minutes and back up the contents of those folders to a D: on another PC. Every Friday I then run about 12 folder pairs to copy them to my external harddrive.

The beauty of this is that it doesn't copy everything, only files that have been added or overwritten since the last sync was done. Therefore I came in this morning and backed up 4 My Documents and 4 Shared Documents folders plus our database folder to my External Harddrive in about 5 minutes. That is less than a minute per folder!

This used to take about an hour and a half a week for me to copy each relevant folder to CD and 30 minutes each week for each employee to back up their My Documents and Shared Documents Folder.

I estimate that this has saved us about 4 hours of time each week.

The extra benefit for us is that our database is on a mapped t: on my PC. If my PC fails everybody else can be up and running in about 5 minutes, by remapping the t: drive to another PC that has the full database on a partitioned D drive.

If all the PC's are stolen from the office we can have access to the database within an hour or so by fetching the external harddrive and mapping that as a T: which can then be accessed via the advisers laptops.

Now at some point it is going to be worth us looking at getting a server and we will look at a large server with 2 drives and use some sort of ghosting software for on site backups. At the moment with only 4 employees along with the recent purchase of a new office, furniture, PC's etc we don't want the expense .