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PC Magazine published a free, simple backup utility called bac.com (from the 1980's, I think) for DOS. It copied files from one drive to another, but did not copy files that had not changed. It had a few (very few) bells and whistles, but I used it regularly and it was very serviceable. Today, however, it cannot handle large files or longer than standard DOS filenames.
Does anyone know of any free or inexpensive utilities similary to bac.com? All I need is to copy files from my had drive to my flash drives for backup, and avoid copying the whole thing (three hours!).
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Answer Best answer as chosen by user mvwoolner
I use a few apps for that.
by R. Proffitt 
- 1/1/13 10:52 AM
In Reply to: Simple file backup (I miss bac.com) by mvwoolner
In the GUI category I use SyncBack and GoodSync.
For the command line you see them at https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=command+line+file+sync
Bob
Thank you. Perhaps some clarification
by mvwoolner - 2/1/13 4:10 PM
In Reply to: I use a few apps for that. by R. Proffitt
Thank you for taking the time to answer my question. What I want may be so simple that it already exists in xcopy; I have read the Microsoft online information about xcopy, but not sure if it does everything I want it to do.
I use a directory called "data" to store all the files I create - jpeg, Word .doc, Excel, PowerPoint, genealogy files, etc., each in it's own directory below "data"
What I would like to do is type in one command line command to replicate all of the subdirectories and files under "data" to my 128GB flash drive, which also has a directory "data" My first copy of this took over 2 hours, and a subsequent copy/past took just as long. I would like to:
copy only files that are new (do not exist on the target) or have been modified since the last copy; and create any new subdirectories and populate them.
Since I plan to do the synchronizing about once a week or so, I was hoping that the process would only take a few minutes if it only involved copying new and changed files, instead of the whole mess.
I was studying the command line switches for xcopy but could not make out if there was a parameter to copy only changed files and new files.
Any help will be appreciated.
And thank you again for taking the time to answer.
Marshall
Sure.
by R. Proffitt - 2/1/13 5:34 PM
In Reply to: Thank you. Perhaps some clarification by mvwoolner
I offered the command line solution (how to find it) and I used to use XCOPY but found it was too easy to trick. So I use more reliable methods.
http://superuser.com/questions/110991/can-you-zip-a-file-from-the-command-prompt-using-only-windows-built-in-capabili covers another system I use.
That is, update it all to a zip file and copy that zip file over. It's much faster. You should try it.
Bob
Total posts: 4 (Showing page 1 of 1)
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