Monday 6 August 2007

For When Youve Had Enough of Vista Backup

Windows Vista came with a brand new backup tool to help save millions of people from loosing all there beloved data. But what happens when the user doesnt want ever file known to man backed up or the categorisation version misses out too much information? Well when it comes to the Vista backup tool your stuffed. Thats all it does, All, or next to nothing. Gutted I decided to bin off Vista Backup tool and find a worthy replacement, amazingly it didnt take too long. Presenting Microsoft Sync Toy v1.4 ;) Amazingly SyncToy does exactly what I want to. I used to use it many moons ago for syncing my uni files on my Laptop with my Desktop PC, but since I left uni and Hayley "inherited" , stole, my laptop I havnt used it. Until tonight that was, I decided to start it up again, create all my folder shares, development, databases, documents, music and photos and then schedule it to run every week. Now on a weekly basis all my files are backed up to a spare internal HDD and an external HDD. When it comes to sync options, SyncToy has every mode under the sun, I decided to set all mine to contribute, so new files, updates and names changes are copied to my backup, however deletions arent, in case I get all shift + del happy ;) And thats it, just simple backed up goodness. Now if you are a fan of having all your information in a backup format MS can see when your reinstalling from a backup etc, why not use SyncToy to get all the data you do want onto a HDD in a suitable format and then get Vista Backup to make its own backup image of that drive, that way all the files you want, none of the ones you dont and no hassle. If only other people thought like me....

2 comments:

Unknown said...

brilliant! superb tool for creating file and folder backups with control (e.g. do not backup deletions)

Unknown said...

Thanks a lot for this although now it is sync tools 2.0. Just like a lot of other small utils in Windows, MS could just not help themselves from dumbing down the backup util.