I'll look into it! I'll need to make some room for it since my partner and I share the same hard drive but with split partitions.
& It's pretty basic in some standards. I currently have a laptop so it's not always connected, but it runs like this:
The software is hard coded to run a backup at 11PM, but it detects if the drive is there first. If not, it sets a reminder 5 minutes before and gives me the option to snooze it or start it once it's connected (it has a hidden txt file in the root with its own key ID, so it doesn't clash with any other device that takes the drives' letter). It creates a folder with the date and time as the name, and then copies all the files from my user folder. So, desktop, downloads, music, videos, etc. If space starts to lack, it automatically removes the oldest backup to make room.
that is what i currently do too, just copy over my user folder files to a USB drive every few days or so, but i do it manually lol
its much easier to do when you just make it a habit to save everything into the user/documents or user/pictures etc folders, but the crappy part is that ransomware almost always will hard target those folders too
There is a thread around here somewhere that some users gave suggestions for programs that automate these types of "file only backups", but if you can code and make your own simple program for that then why not
lol
how did you code the program? in what language?
sounds cool and useful, if you want you could share it on the backups forum section and maybe some users who know coding could give helpful tips etc to you if you feel like it
This thread talks about denying read/write access to USB drives to only backup programs that are used for backups. It will help mitigate the chances that ransomware etc can mess up the backup files on the external drive.
Do you use sync software and if so, which one?
Kind of - It saves the last drive letter it was last accessed from. If it can't find the key anymore from that drive, or it has been taken over by another device, it goes through an array of the alphabet and looks for "[drive]\bkupKey.txt". If it can't find the drive at all, it throws an error and what not.
I'll keep a look out. As I said, I'll need to reserve some space on my External HDD, since me and my partner share the disk on different partitions. Sounds useful, though!
if you decide to do image backups too (i am looking into this also myself) then macrium reflect free gets a thumbs up by many (most?) users around here and seems to be one of the most reliable solutions when it comes time to restore an image. But macrium does not have a folder/file backup feature in the free version, only images. Another program i am looking at is from Veeam (Veeam agent for windows free) i think it has folder/file backup and volume backup options too and of course the "entire computer" option. Seems that Veeam is a popular name in enterprise backup world, so i think their program might be pretty decent. Another is Aoemi backupper, but i am not sure if they have folder/file backup feature in the free version.
@frogboy i think has had some crappy experiences with other imaging programs (easeUS todo and/or acronis i think?) and google brings up many others with problems too, so I am not bothering to test either of those programs at the moment
If you do start to do image backups, look at the incremental or differential image features. That way you make 1 full system image then a series of incremental or differential images which are much smaller in size (since you mentioned making some room on your external drive). I would probably make another more up to date full image eventually and delete prior ones accordingly, but the incremental or differential images will help save space
seems you already do this from your responses, but make sure you only connect the external drive when you need it (to make the file backups, or to manually get/put files on it etc). Don't leave it connected perpetually or too long after you are done using it. Ransomware likes to target external drives and network shares too and having encrypted backups is no help if you need to restore from them lol.
