Posts by frozenpuma87

Drew Allen77 said:Why not?

That’s basically the whole point of these kinds of programs, isn't it?

So, what option are you actually looking for—something that mirrors the original source perfectly without wasting any time?
Honestly, I'm thinking your only real move is to just wipe everything and clone the original drive from scratch. I highly doubt the software is smart enough to realize it's looking at the exact same file with a different name—it probably won't skip the copy process, so you'll just end up burning time for nothing.

Drew Allen77 said:I’ve messed around with https://freefilesync.org/ before—it’s decent enough. You just tell it what needs backing up and then it only syncs the files you actually changed later on.

This tool is actually pretty solid! Thanks for sharing. It’s clean and easy to wrap your head around.
But honestly? I don't think any software out there—no matter how fancy—can truly handle someone who treats their folder structure like a game of Tetris. If you're constantly renaming stuff, dragging folders into other folders, moving files around, or just nuking entire directories... good luck. I highly doubt there's an app alive that can actually track all that madness without tripping over itself. Usually, they just end up keeping those "deleted" files sitting on your backup drive forever, eating up space because the software thinks they're still supposed to be there.

Thanks! I'll give it a shot.

I couldn't find it in whatever app I was running at the time—it just vanished on me.
So, what kind of (free) backup software are you actually recommending?

Nicholas King said:So, what, you basically live at your desk 24/7?

If you’re the type who spends way too much time shuffling files and folders around your drive, just let the software handle the backup overnight—problem solved, everyone's happy.

I don't get it. When I talk about moving stuff, I mean it as a way of organizing things—you know, cleaning house. Every once in a while, maybe once every few years, you decide to reorganize your whole drive structure, and honestly, it can be a massive headache. My point was about updating everything after that move. I'm not even sure if a backup program is smart enough to recognize those changes and mirror them onto your external drive or the cloud.

I messed around with that software, but honestly, I couldn't quite wrap my head around it. I’ll give it another shot later.
It absolutely drags my system to a halt whenever it's synced to the cloud—just constant uploading killing my bandwidth. No issues at all when I use an external drive, though.
It blows my mind that Bill Gates hasn't engineered software that actually recognizes when a file has been modified (like, check the timestamp, people!) instead of just seeing the same filename and assuming nothing changed.
And don't even get me started on the sheer amount of grunt work involved when you're organizing data on a hard drive—moving stuff into different folders, setting up subdirectories, all that jazz. When you go to sync those changes to a backup drive, it should just be a simple move operation, right? Moving files is way faster than re-uploading everything from scratch. But no, the computer gets totally confused during the update process and fails to take the path of least resistance. It feels like no software has actually mastered that level of logic yet...

How are you guys handling this? What’s your go-to for keeping your data safe?

Thanks for the reply!

But honestly, that first method feels way too risky to me—why on earth would I put everything on someone else's dime? Why should I rely entirely on Bill Gates? I’d much rather have my own hardware be my primary option. What if I get locked out because of some password issue, or what if he decides to hike up the prices, or heaven forbid, the whole service just crashes... I don't know, I just don't like having all my eggs in someone else's basket...
I want my local drive to be my go-to, with cloud backups acting as the safety net.
The second way you suggested just drags my computer's performance through the mud...

It's the same deal with my external hard drive—I keep a backup on there that I update every once in a while, but I haven't really nailed down a solid workflow yet. Right now, I just wipe the slate clean and copy everything over from my PC again...

Look, my main priority here is just making sure the work I've busted my tail on doesn't vanish into thin air. I’ve had a hard drive die on me once before—thank god some IT guys at a local firm managed to pull it back from the brink—but hey, that's why you save things to other drives, right? And one of those options is the cloud.
I’m working at a school, and we students have access to Microsoft 365, which includes Google Drive (the cloud side of things). Now, moving files from my computer up there isn't exactly rocket science, but the real headache starts when I actually edit or update a file. How do I swap out the old versions for the new ones? Obviously, the filenames stay the same. So, how do I push those updates up to Bill Gates's cloud? If I try to sync everything once a month by just dragging the whole folder over, the cloud doesn't seem to realize that certain files have been tweaked—it just looks at them and decides the outdated version is fine where it is. One "fix" is to just wipe everything in the cloud and re-upload the entire folder from scratch. But man, that takes forever. Even if I could find an option like "skip or replace duplicate filename"—which I haven't found yet—selecting "replace" ends up doing the exact same thing: re-copying the whole damn folder.
What’s the smartest way to handle this? I tried using sync once, but it turned my computer into a total snail. Is there a way to just swap out the specific files I’ve messed with and upload any brand-new ones? Basically, I just want to update the state of the cloud so it matches my computer perfectly without wasting half my life doing it.