file copying

[Rodney Gold]

Plenty programs that will do that and allow you set paramaters , we use a program called Second copy and it writes changed and amended files to various removable devices and date server on our network
Try http://www.tucows.com for freeware stuff to do this

[Bryan Cabrera]

What version of Windows?

You should be able to use Briefcase for this sort of thing or even the built in backup software.

There are also tons of shareware/freeware.

Search the Windows Help for Briefcase. I am on my out, but will help you further if you get stuck. Just let me know.

Bryan

[David Rowland]

http://www.maxoutput.com/FileBack/

this is setup on the server, I have set it up to scan all the corel draw files and makes 1_file.cdr and keeps a two-three revisions of a file on a backup harddrive on another computer in another room. So many features and well worth the money. Works really well as a cheap backup device. I checked out lots of programs before settling on this.

I use it for email/accounts/important/removable and a live continnous backup so if a file goes corrupt, i have a chance of getting it back.

[Peter Shaw]

I use BackupExpress Pro. This is shareware and can be downloaded. I have it setup to copy onto a different machine on the network as backup, every 15 minutes. You can select the files you want and reject those you don’t with the inbuilt filters. It runs in background and loads automatically, so you don’t have to think about it.

[Chris Wool]

thanks for imput.
after a disaster with a hard disk and even worse with so called back ups i built a raid system using raid mirror on 2 disks and a portable third disc to copy the accounts and customer dir on to. too be removed from the premises

the customer dir is some 50 gigs and i think 6000 files so from now on only new and altered files to go to the removable after the raid discs.
is that what your suggesting the other software will do or am i complicating things.
i dont trust cds or backup stuff that compresses the files

i am now of the opinion that the safest storage is hard disks but change them every 18 months. the price of them now is so cheep compared

chris

[David Rowland]

yeah, thats it. Our server is a Raid Mirror and the backup is on a removable harddrive and a second backup is on a fixed drive on another machine. It does practically all types of backup, however we choosen to do a daily 2005 backup to the removable and that starts early in the morning. The daily backups are going to the fixed drive. We didn’t want to splash out on specialist tape/backup software solution as with the drop in prices on harddrives so we setup this.

Only snag, on the removable harddrive scenario, if using a share folder on the harddrive, it can be a pain to configure it for a ‘swapped’ hard drive. Might be able to get over this with some carefully thought and planning and hasn’t really upset us.

Other issues is “File in Use”, “Macintosh files stored on a windows server with funny names”.

Things i like, at the end of the backup cycle, it emails me a log of the backup. So many features in that software it is crazy and fairly stable.

[Bryan Cabrera]

RAID is definetly a great way to go however you should still backup on removable media and keep it off premise.

Tape backups are good for large amounts of data.

I am not sure why you don’t trust compression—it has been used for a very long time and is very reliable.

Any good backup software will allow you to turn off compression if you want and will allow you to do incremental backups after a complete backup. This way you only have to back up new files and files that have changed.

Bryan