Yesterday, while talking to a good friend of mine, I had one of those moments when something just strikes you - and you realize its significance. I like to call them "a ha!" moments. In any event, this one stemmed from a very easy to overlook setting in Microsoft SyncToy - the tool I use to automate the nightly backups of my photos.
Then I realized, that often times I remind people to "back up your photos" but I've never shared how I do it. So we'll do that first, and then proceed to the "a ha" moment from yesterday.
I use a free Microsoft utility called SyncToy (version 1.4) to backup my photos between my internal hard drive, and my external hard drive each night. SyncToy is not the most robust program (it has a couple of "well, that doesn't make sense" issues) but for the most part I've been very happy with it. You can download your free copy of it from Microsoft, here.
When you open the tool, the first thing you'll need to do is "Create New Folder Pair" - which is essentially where you choose a left folder (what you want to back up) and right folder (where you want to put it). You can click the image below to see just how simple the interface is.
After you've selected your folder pair, you'll want to choose the "echo" option. This option takes any changes from the left folder and echos them in the right folder. The tool provides a short explanation of what each option does, which you might want to play around with for other uses of SyncToy, but I use echo for my backups.
That's essentially it! You can then either kick off the tool manually each evening before bed, or use Microsoft's built in scheduling tool to automatically run SyncToy each night.
Now for the "a ha" moment. If you select the folder pair you just created, and choose options the following setting appear.
Note the "Check File Contents" option is not selected. What this does is that tells SyncToy to examine all of the data contained in the file when decided whether or not to copy it to the destination directory. I avoided doing this just because I assumed it would take MUCH LONGER for the synchronization to occur (which it does) - but my buddy pointed out another very significant reason NOT to choose this option.
Say you've backed up all your photos every night like you're supposed to, but instead of a failure of your primary hard-drive you get a corruption of your primary hard-drive. The data in all of your photos is now garbled and trashed - a real mess. With "check file contents" selected , SyncToy comes online that evening, interprets the corrupted data as user modified files - and overwrites your backup with the garbage data. Catastrophe!!
In the same scenario, if "check file contents" is not selected - SyncToy sees that your photos are already on the backup drive - and decides it doesn't need to copy them again. Safe and sound.
Oh the difference a check box can make. Hope everyone is having a great week. That's all for now.
