[Leica] Question Re Backing Up to External Hard Drives

[hoppyman at bigpond.net.au (G Hopkinson)]

Bob, Gary is correct. He is describing the normal process of a number of 
files queued to be copied. If one file fails to copy none
further will be copied until you intervene. So yes you can start again but 
it is not automated.
With Retrospect, if you select an incremental back up, files that are no 
longer present in the parent directory will be deleted from
the back up copy. However you are not obliged to use that particular method. 
You can too, have multiple versions of a folder or back
up. There is also an option to verify the integrity of back up copies.

Frankly I am not confident in my ability to use Retrospect to restore an 
entire system onto a new drive. There are complexities with
my PCs regarding having to have drivers present with SATA drives and RAID 
controllers. I don't even have floppy drives fitted
routinely. They are required to load the drivers for Windows to even 
recognise that there is a HDD present. Typically, I treat the
back up as a dumb duplicate of my C drive, that is all of the files are 
there. A reinstall is still a huge PITA but at least I have
all of the files. This is lazy I suppose. Not enough hours in the day, I'm 
twelve months behind just filing film!

Cheers
Hoppy

-----Original Message-----
From: lug-bounces+hoppyman=bigpond.net.au@leica-users.org 
[mailto:lug-bounces+hoppyman=bigpond.net.au@leica-users.org] On Behalf Of
Robert D. Baron
Sent: Thursday, 24 May 2007 22:58
To: lug@leica-users.org
Subject: Re:[Leica] Question Re Backing Up to External Hard Drives

Thanks for the responses.

Hoppy, the Western Digital MyBook (at least the version I am looking at, 
there are several) does come with Retrospect Express. I didn't realize 
you could set it to do non-compressed backups.  That would be good, I think.

Gary, when you write:

> the problem with a simple Windows file-to-file backup (as in 
> dragging and dropping all your folders to the backup drive), is that 
> you can't restart the process where it left off if something goes 
> wrong. One corrupted file will halt the whole Windows Explorer file 
> transfer process

I would then ask: If you have a bad file can't you then just re-start 
the copying process, or am I missing something?  I should point out that 
I won't be doing huge backups at any one time; by that I mean probably 
copying less than 10GB.

And a related question about these programs that do incremental backups: 
  if I (intentionally or not) delete an image file from a directory, 
when the backup program is looking for new or modified files to add to 
the backup will it delete from the backup the file I have deleted from 
my computer?

Thanks all.  I know this subject gets repeated from time to time but it 
is an important one I think, particularly for us relative computer 
neophytes.

--Bob




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