Saturday, January 14, 2023

The makeshift Incremental Backup

 My revised archive system is bedding done nicely.

As a gentleman of leisure now, I don’t produce as much data as I used to and thus the automated incremental backups (such as having a NAS system constantly) are no longer urgent and the number of files is considerably smaller. The old NAS has stopped working and the priority of setting up such a system has almost disappeared.

However, in setting up the three-tiered archive system (Son-Father-Grandfather) and re-arranging my back-pack portable harddrives, I ended up with one older 1.5GB that was slightly bulkier than the rest. Significantly it didn’t fit the small zip-up disk wallets I was using to store the archive sets.

I thought it would give me the opportunity to store incremental backups, so I put it through a few chkdsk/fix sessions and all was well. I just kept it on my desk (but not connected) and then at least each week or more often if I doing a lot of stuff (eg larger photo session). All that is required is setting up an INC Backup folder and setting up 5 folders below that for each week in the month, which will ensure I have fewer files to look through should I need to recover anything. I just plug it in and copy anything I’ve been recently working onto the drive.

I’m doing this manually but it is not a big task anymore other than remembering what to copy. Maybe I should set up an automatic file synch system. Hopefully, that can wait.

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