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If anyone can improve the title, then please edit it. Thanks.

I am currently using Bvckup2. which I find to be well worth the price.

Most of my data, I just mirror, but for some of it, I backup into daily, weekly and monthly.

However, while some of it changes on a daily basis, some of it doesn't, and can be quit large. E.g DLLs.

I want to be able to just give the root of a directory tree and backup on a daily/weekly/monthly basis whatever has changed, while having one copy of the unchanged files (copies add up, if you have 7 daily, 12 monthly & 52 weekly backups of an unchanged DLL).

Is there a backup program to do that? I am willing to pay up to £/$/Eur 50 -ish.

If not, is there something which I can schedule to run daily and delete all but the most recent copy of duplicated files?

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    rsync does exactly what you're describing, all you need is to schedule it to run with task manager and it only transfers changed data. There are other tools as well, check out DirSyncPro, a gratis java application that my friend swears by it.
    – Lockszmith
    Sep 25, 2021 at 13:56
  • Upvote, but I am not sure if you read the question (no offence intended). It's easy to synch a directory & not copy unchanged files, BUT, if you read again, I am copying to multiple destinations - daily/weekly/monthly e.g for directory X, it gets backup up to X_monday, X-tuesday ... and X_jaunary, X_ february, plus X_01 to X_52 - and I only want one copy of each unchanged file
    – Mawg says reinstate Monica
    Sep 25, 2021 at 16:58
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    You are right, I did not understand it from your explanation. I do now.
    – Lockszmith
    Sep 26, 2021 at 18:05
  • No problems. I hope that you can offer some help :-)
    – Mawg says reinstate Monica
    Sep 27, 2021 at 9:35
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    Sounds to me you're looking for a quick way to backup with snapshots, but looking for a way to keep those snapshots 'live' so you can access it any time. I can't find anything specific that distributes into timestamped subfolders. There are copy-on-write file systems that do that (you can do it with ZFS on linux/unix). Take a look at SnapRAID, it might be something that works for you. I'll keep my eyes open for anything that might match
    – Lockszmith
    Sep 28, 2021 at 16:20

1 Answer 1

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You accomplish your goal with SyncBackFree (portable version available here), SyncBackSE, and SyncBackPro.

You can compare the different editions here. SyncBackFree is gratis, SyncBackSE is within your price range, and SyncBackPro is at the high end of your price range.

They are all from 2BrightSparks. I have used their software for many years and find it to be of high quality.

The first step will be to use any tool you like (such as attrib, which is included with Windows) to enable the Archive bit on every file on your drive partition(s).

The next step will be to create a profile in any of the SyncBack products to only copy files with the Archive attribute enabled, and to remove the attribute once the copy operation is done.

To accomplish this, create a new SyncBack profile and go to the Compare Options tab in the profile's setup window (the tabs are positioned vertically along the left edge of the profile's setup window). In that tab, check the checkbox for "Only copy files that do have the archive attribute set".

Next, go to the profile's Copy/Delete tab, and then the Advanced sub-tab (the sub-tabs are along the top of the profile's setup window). Now, enable the "Reset the archive file attribute on files once they have been copied" option for the profile.

Outside of these somewhat hard-to-find settings, everything else should be relatively obvious. For each profile, you can specify which folders and files to backup. You can create multiple profiles to break up your backup tasks into smaller segments, if you like. This can be very nice when you are actively working on a project and want to make sure all of the project's files are fully backed up.

Enjoy!

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