Thinkpads Forum

After using computers seriously for more than 15 years, I have finally decided that it is time for me to become more sophisticated in making backups of my data. Until now I have basically made full manual backups, either to external hard drives or to multiple sets of CD/DVDs.

I now want to increase the frequency of my backups and have discovered that my old brute force approach (i.e. full manual backups) is not a very smart nor convenient way to do it.

After thinking a while on how I would want to proceed with backups I have come to believe that the ideal backup software for me would fulfill the following criteria:

1. Backups made to an external hard drive should not be in a compressed or monolithic format, but should be an exact copy of the file system that is being backed up.

2. New backups should be made through file and directory synchronization, so that recurring backups only need to copy new/updated files/folders to the external drive

3. The backup software should be able to use Shadow Copy (I am using Windows XP) so that all files are copied at backup time (even those that are open/locked).

4. The ability to make backups/synchronize files over the Internet, either through FTP or by other means (e.g. connecting to a client-utility running on the backup-target machine) is a plus but not required

Given the above I tried to google for suitable backup software and I found a few that seemed to fit the profile. However, since I have never ever used backup software and are completely unfamiliar with backup software vendors I now turn to you for help.

Given my criteria above, what backup software would you recommend and what are your personal experiences.

I've used Retrospect for about a decade for incremental backups on both Mac and Windows platform. I've been pretty happy with it, but I recently switched to Norton Ghost.

Pro for Ghost:

Ghost runs the backup process as a service; I usually don't even notice it's running. (2.5GHz dual core, 4GB RAM installed with 3GB visible to Vista SP1). Compared to the slow bloat of Symantec's AV products, you can tell they bought this from a smaller company!

Ghost 14 (I have v12) claims to be able to back up to FTP and NAS.

Con for Ghost:

at least Ghost 12 may have a problem when it encounters encrypted files/folders. It seems to hang. My workaround for now is simply to not do that.

Pro for Retrospect:

Ability to back up other computers, even a Mac.

Con for Retrospect:

(v 7.5)
Retrospect runs backup as an application called by a timer service, so whenever it started, Retrospect would switch focus to itself. More than once while starting. It became quite annoying.


I have also looked at both the Thinkvantage backup and Vista's backup. Both seem very slow and more cumbersome.

I'm sorry I'm not familiar with the shadow copy terminology. I can tell you that both programs have been able to backup large Outlook .pst files while Outlook was running. Maybe I just got lucky, though.

jketzetera wrote: Given my criteria above, what backup software would you recommend and what are your personal experiences.

Since you are a XP user Robocopy would be an option.(available now on Vista, or I could send you the tiny .exe for it. freeware from microsoft)

Robocopy requires simple batch file creation. Super easy to do.

Another very good utility is Syncback. Both freeware or very reasonable price for the pro version.

I have used both for years with big success. Robocopy will not copy open files, but syncback claims to. I close Outlook when doing a backup.

Both programs are very very fast and only copy new files or folders, with options to delete files no longer on destination, which is what you want, I assume.

Syncback has tons of easy to understand options and switches. One of the most well thought out programs on the planet!

Ah. Just read your post more carefully. That exact file copy part is the kicker.

I have set up something like this using the Robocopy utility you can download from Microsoft's web site. But it doesn't support open files except by retrying. It particularly doesn't like things like your user.dat file.

I did find some hints about using something called "vshadow.exe" to start a script that uses robocopy. http://www.eggheadcafe.com/tutorials/as ... e-bac.aspx This could be promising; it appears to be part of a Volume Shadow Copy Service SDK downloadable from Microsoft.

Depending how much scripting you've done in those 15 years, you might be able to "roll your own" for free...