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cds0528
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Location: other side of the world
Registered: 6/27/2006 Warnings: 0

External HDD question(s)
Okay, so we got an external HDD (finally) to have backups of both pictures and important documents (as you can imagine my dad has a mess of important docs), so we got one recently. What my dad wanted is an automated way of backing up the stuff so he doesn't get copies mixed up, and the first thing that came to mind was using a .bat file. Couple questions on that though, first, is there a better (yet still free) way to do this, and second, would it be totally overwrite or just check for changes. The reason I ask the second one, is say he backs up X document on Monday. On Wednesday he opens the local copy, makes some changes, saves it, plugs in the HDD, and runs the backup utility, does it make that change on the HDD copy, or does it just see that the file exists already.

Also am I right in assuming when I pop it in I'm gonna want to format it as NTFS?

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3/27/2007 04:22

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byerspc
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Location: South Bend, IN
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Yes I would do NTFS and I would use the microsoft power toy called sync toy http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

This app is sweet because you setup folder copy relationships. You can have it mirror or you can have it save every version of a document etc. You can have keep even docs that you deleted from the source etc. The program is completely free and you can set it up to run in the scheduled tasks to run whenever you want. Note you will want to do a search on the parameters or in the help for scheduling it. You can schedule it to run all your folder pairs or only specific ones.

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3/27/2007 04:57

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byerspc
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another thing...fyi synctoy can also backup over the network...
back up from desktop to a shared folder or drive etc.

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3/27/2007 04:59

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cds0528
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Location: other side of the world
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sync toy sounds pretty good, problem is, I try to install it and it gives me a message saying it needs to install .net framework and it gives me a link, so I follow the link, but it seems to be dead... (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480198.aspx)

Edit: nevermind, it just took 10 minutes to load...

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