Duplicating Files on Two Hard Drives to Make a Backup

[billyo]

i second that..i did a clone ( 2 of ea on )both of my laptops hdd ( show and back-up )..and now i dont have to worry about my hhd crashing..and i have all my kma files back-up on on several hdd's.

[seawolf]

The only downside I have encountered is that if you edit your songs, you have to do it to ALL drives. So far, I have not found a program that will allow you to clone a directory. Laplink and others of that ilk make both equal, but if you have deleted songs from the master, Laplink will replace them with files from the spare.

Does anybody out there know of a true "folder cloning" program?

DC

[billyo]

I used Acronis software and it will clone everything in your drive.

[ddouglass]

Originally Posted by seawolf

The only downside I have encountered is that if you edit your songs, you have to do it to ALL drives. So far, I have not found a program that will allow you to clone a directory. Laplink and others of that ilk make both equal, but if you have deleted songs from the master, Laplink will replace them with files from the spare.

Does anybody out there know of a true "folder cloning" program?

DC

If you do a back-up, and select just that folder then "restore" it to the other location it is the same as cloning. It may take a couple of minutes longer, but does work.

[seawolf]

Looks to me like an opportunity to fill a niche. In the old days of tape backup, you had the option to perform "incremental" or "differential" backups, copying only the changed files. That didn't, however, delete the files in the target folder.

It would be great to have that type of flexibility with today's technology, telling the program to make folder "A" identical to folder "B", etc. indicating direction of data flow a la Laplink.

DC

[ddouglass]

You do have those capabilities (incremental and differential) in most back-up programs.

[seawolf]

Thanks, Dale...I understand all of that. The point is that none of the programs use the primary folder information as a reference to DELETE those songs/files that no longer exist. They only ADD new or changed files.

DC

[bryant]

Originally Posted by seawolf

Thanks, Dale...I understand all of that. The point is that none of the programs use the primary folder information as a reference to DELETE those songs/files that no longer exist. They only ADD new or changed files.

DC

Man, I could sure use something like that too as a lot of the DJ programs I use store song information in their database files, but when I end up deleting files from the main song folder, the information stays and eventually clogs , slows down, or corrupts the database entirely.

What I do for a workaround is every once in a while completely delete the backups, then re-backup the entire main drive again (twice). Takes all night for each!!