Hey guys, I couldn’t find a recent topic on this, so I hope you don’t mind me creating one. I’m writing because I’m looking for free backup software that can:
Backup data to an external USB hard drive.
Perform daily incremental backups rather than having to do a full backup each time.
Can do mirror backups (i.e. just the files with directories intact, no zipping).
I ask because I tried FBackup4 and while it seems competent, it doesn’t do incremental backups so it would take hours whenever I’d want to do a backup. I’d rather have something that can do incremental backups so it’ll only backup what’s been changed or added.
A system where you have an exact copy of the backup tree for each day you backup available would not benefit from incremental backup on Windows, as you’d have to write out a separate copy of each file for every backup anyway.
It wouldn’t be a new separate backup for each day, that would be ridic. I basically want all the backup files on a separate HD, with a program to only backup new or changed files. Am I making sense, because I’m not sure?
Hhmmm, maybe synchronize is a better word? I’d like a program to sync the changes I make on my main drive (i.e. adding music) to the backup copy on a USB drive.
Dude, SyncToy is awesome. I also learned from How To Geek how to use it to sync my freelance work folder on my HD with the folder on my DropBox. Using the scheduler, I’ll have up-to-date copies of both every day if I need to work away from home on a laptop. That freelance work folder also gets backed up each night within the My Documents folder. It’s amazing.
For what it’s worth, why not just put your freelance work folder into your dropbox, and place a shortcut at the original location? Then you’re not relying on your home machine being on to do things. You can also just add the dropbox folder location to your backup process.
I could honestly do either at this point. All of my work is in Drop Box, and I usually work from there, but I have it synced to a “Freelance Work” folder in my documents, and my documents gets backed up each morning.
Haven’t yet tried it myself yet (I’ve been using macrium on my windows machines) but Easeus backup looks promising and claims to offer free incremental backup to home users.
I paid for the full version of Macrium Reflect after trying the free one and the comparison chart in the link you provided says incremental is only in the non-free version.
Incremental backup creates a new backup which only contains changes made since the last backup. In the typical method it is an inherently versioning backup, where you can restore to any particular backup date. In many cases is it considered inferior to differential backup, in which each backup is only the changes since the last full backup, as damage to any one of the incremental backup files will damage the entire backup, at least after the date of the damage. This usually isn’t a significant problem for home backup where you’re probably backing up to a single external hard drive, not to multiple tapes, and nearly all home backup software treats the incremental as if it is a full backup if all the files are in the same location.
