for those of you familiar with rsync on Linux, you will know what a powerful and useful backup tool this is. Not only does it offer local, lan, and remote backups but it seamlessly integrates incremental and mirror options too.
Windows users seem to have fewer viable options for a good all round backup solution, apart for rdiff-backup.
Download here: rdiff-backup-1.2.8-win32
rdiff will literally mirror the source directory including all of it’s files and sub directories with your specified destination directory. Once the initial clone has been performed any subsequent transfers only update files that have actually changed since the last backup / mirror.
To run, simply open a command prompt: (start, run, cmd) and change directory to where you have rdiff downloaded and extracted to. (I’d suggest extracting rdiff to the c:/users/yourusername directory as by default this is where Windows opens it’s command prompt)
To start your backup simply type the following:
rdiff-backup c:/source/location/ g:/destinations/location
If you’re transferring over a network it may be easier to map the network share as a local drive so that you can access it with a drive letter.
Depending on the size of the backup / drive mirror it may take some time to complete, rdiff does not show a progress bar so be patient! It will alert you if it encounters errors along the way. After the first backup / mirror is complete, subsequent backups should be significantly quicker unless a lot of files have changed / been updated/
teracopy provides a simple option to backup files, without incremental options. It will allow you to skip files that haven’t changed by date / older options. You can also pause, resume and queue teracopy transfers over the LAN as well as over local drives.