free auto-backup?

[skier]

are there any free applications that can backup entire images of a hard drive on a schedule or "backup upon modified/new file" to an external HDD, i know of several externals that come with the kind of software i'm looking for, just want to know if i can set up a spare 40GB notebook drive as a permanent external(what i want to backup has less than 9GB used space)

[bubba]

I have bad experiences with backups that are compressed and put on an external via software. Stuff not coming back, to coming back with the wrong extension or no extension at all, to not being able to be read on another machine other than the initial PC it was backed up on. List goes on.

If you want to do full on drive imaging, Go with Achronos True Image. It will also do backups to compressed folders of selected files and folders if you want.


Me, I do 1:1 file backups of important non-OS files using the RoboCopy command on a schedule for some things, others I kick it up by hand. The command has switches that will compare source and destination add/remove/copy source changes as required. Its quick too once you get pass the first run, and in Win7 it multi threaded now.

RoboCopy is free, Achronis is not

[skier]

robocopy sounds like what i want and i dont need anything compressed as the system in question is currently using 8.5GB on the hard drive including xp home (not nLite'd) but i need to move my drives around a bit before i can try anything

[bubba]

For XP you will need to get the Windows 2003 Resource Kit and install that, this will get you the RoboCopy command.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en

Here is a thread I made with code and batch file examples

http://forums.legitreviews.com/post165740.html