Why isn't there an easy way to copy a folder between drives and only copy the new files? It's silly to overwrite 15,000 files for a backup, when only a few have changed.
I could write a mess of specialized xcopy batch files, or kluge up some sort of utility, but there ought to be a fix for this.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
It's irritating that they allow a "yes to all" but not a "no to all" option.
Second Copy works pretty well for crude, but effective, backups. You just set it to run at some specific time (say 4AM) and it does. The version I have doesn't copy open files, but apparently they've fixed that. The only issue I've noticed is that it grabs files while it's copying so it can lock out other programs that run periodically (such as mail programs), causing errors.
rsync. Works like a champ--another one I use daily. You can also do it bidirectionally, using unison, but it takes a lot more setup.
I also use git, which is a super-fast and lightweight version control system, for a lot of my backups. That way I not only get good backups, but I can retrieve any old version of anything, back to when the repository was first created. I used to use date-labelled zipfiles for that, and when I switched over, I wrote a script that unzipped each of the zipfiles into the same directory, overwriting old versions, and created a git commit after each one.
That way I have git repositories that go back way before git was written. A software time machine. ;)
options. It has been my best friend for ages (I have real frinds also)
Hi, Klaus
formatting link
Can it drag-copy folders between panes, with only newer files copied? Or would I have to type a command?
I have a terabyte USB hard drive that I like to dump things onto, for backup and to load them onto other computers. Windows drag-drop copy works, but takes hours to over-write existing files. I do want the flexibility of manually copying stuff, so I prefer to not use some automatic backup program.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
options. It has been my best friend for ages (I have real frinds also)
You have at least two options. There's a button to click for copy. At the first overwrite, you get the option to overwrite only older files or not at all or... The synchronize directories tool is good for this. Try TC, you'll never go back.
That syntax will copy everything into destdir\sourcedir, which is what I usually want. Put a trailing slash on sourcedir if you want it to work like XCOPY, i.e. putting the files into destdir instead of destdir\sourcedir.
It has FTP connect also, and perhaps the function I use the most is the tab s. Last used directories when closed is displayed at startup, and tabs make s fast switching between dirs easy. More stuff like search for files with s pecified creation dates, names etc along with searches inside files.
I use it also to backup to a NAS storage, with 10 Tbytes.
Another nice feature, if you need to go into a directory, but there is many, press Alt-g and start letter, then only dirs with that starting letter is shown
As far as I know, windows has had a folder sync option for a while now.
Long ago I used to use my own software to do such task, most of which was and is available in third party tools. If you're able to write yourown in short time, why not.
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