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Question

Simple file backup (I miss bac.com)

Jan 1, 2013 2:39AM PST

PC Magazine published a free, simple backup utility called bac.com (from the 1980's, I think) for DOS. It copied files from one drive to another, but did not copy files that had not changed. It had a few (very few) bells and whistles, but I used it regularly and it was very serviceable. Today, however, it cannot handle large files or longer than standard DOS filenames.

Does anyone know of any free or inexpensive utilities similary to bac.com? All I need is to copy files from my had drive to my flash drives for backup, and avoid copying the whole thing (three hours!).

Discussion is locked

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Clarification Request
BAC.COM Update
Jul 23, 2013 2:38AM PDT

Marshall

I was looking for exactly the same utility as you when I found your post. I used BAC.COM previously extensively and miss its re Lotus Notes "replication" features which I would like to find in a current command line utility as well. I too have a data/files directory on both my PC and Flashdrive on which I use to keep current files. I now teach at several colleges and keep class/semester related schedules, docs etc on my flashdrive which I access at school. Recently my flashdrive had a hardware error, from which I was able to recover, but it forced me to now copy from one directory to another, making sure I keep track of the time and date file stamps to make I am not overwritin anything important - which is a tedious task at best - I do not have tha amount of data that do you, but have multiple subdirectories I have to manually sync.

As an old DOS expert and recent Lotus Notes Professional, I would like to find a current utility that would meld the features of the two, the DOS BAC.COM command line simplictiy, with the "replication" features of Notes that keeps every instance of a file in sync.

Please let me know if you have been lucky enough to find something.... surely with all the software out there, some one has written/updated this handy utility - especially now it would seem with all the flash drives out there.

Perhaps we can pool our request to get something done.


Thanks
Tom

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Answer
I use a few apps for that.
Jan 1, 2013 2:52AM PST
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Thank you. Perhaps some clarification
Feb 1, 2013 8:10AM PST

Thank you for taking the time to answer my question. What I want may be so simple that it already exists in xcopy; I have read the Microsoft online information about xcopy, but not sure if it does everything I want it to do.

I use a directory called "data" to store all the files I create - jpeg, Word .doc, Excel, PowerPoint, genealogy files, etc., each in it's own directory below "data"

What I would like to do is type in one command line command to replicate all of the subdirectories and files under "data" to my 128GB flash drive, which also has a directory "data" My first copy of this took over 2 hours, and a subsequent copy/past took just as long. I would like to:

copy only files that are new (do not exist on the target) or have been modified since the last copy; and create any new subdirectories and populate them.

Since I plan to do the synchronizing about once a week or so, I was hoping that the process would only take a few minutes if it only involved copying new and changed files, instead of the whole mess.

I was studying the command line switches for xcopy but could not make out if there was a parameter to copy only changed files and new files.

Any help will be appreciated.

And thank you again for taking the time to answer.

Marshall

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Sure.
Feb 1, 2013 9:34AM PST