Peder Borg Borup

I must admit, that I’m not that good at actually doing real backups. I never do a ghost of my laptop because I know, that just to hours after my ghost, I’ll either do an update, or install some software.

The solution for me has been Mirror.exe from Dominik Jain.

Mirror makes exact copies of directories (or entire directory structures) with minimal operations, which is ideal for backing up data on DVD-RWs or over a network, for example. It will overwrite existing files only if necessary and delete files in the destination that are no longer present in the source (unidirectional synchronization). Mirror can ignore files that match regular expressions or file masks.

Snip from the homepage of Dominik Jain, which can be found here.

I have then made a small bat-file, whick contains:

mirror “C:\Users\My Real Username\Documents” “F:\My Real Username\Backup Vista\Documents”
mirror “C:\Users\My Real Username\Desktop” “F:\My Real Username\Backup Vista\Desktop”
mirror “C:\Users\My Real Username\Favorites” “F:\My Real Username\Backup Vista\Favorites”

Each line represents a folder-to-folder sync. Mirror is extremely fast and accurate. I know, that it’s not a backup, and that I can’t go back and find deleted files. But what I really basically need is to have my files in an external location, if my main disk fails.

I know, that Microsoft has a similar tool called SyncToy. Been there, done that, don’t  like it. Slow, not that easy to setup – but, gets the job done.