Maintaining backup integrity

[agraham]

I hope no-one takes this amiss as these attachments are not written in B4PPC. However while organising my backups just now it occurred to me that these utilities that I wrote to help me might deserve a wider audience as I find them invaluable.

I keep my backups on two additional separate disks as mirror images of the folders and sub-folders that I want to backup from my main disk. One of the disks is my D: and the other is a USB drive that can unplugged and stored separately. I do this as even DVDs are too small and fiddly to back up to and storage is so cheap nowadays. I want to make backing up so easy that it is routine. Over time differences creep in between the backup copies and the originals due to deletions and reorganisation. I wrote these utilities to manage my backups and give me assurance that all is well.

I first use a batch file, example enclosed in the zip, to copy over changed files to my D: drive. I do the same thing for my partner's PC over the network. I then in turn use a similar batch file to copy the D:backups to the external drive. I then occasionally check the integrity of the backup copies using the TreeDifference utility enclosed. Any differences found may be corrected using the DirectoryDifference utility enclosed which is linked to TreeDifference using .NET Remoting. A help file explains. It really beats trying to find differences with two instances of Windows Eplorer!

Put the two exes and the dll in the same directory and play! Unfortunately they are compiled for and so require .NET 2.0 on your desktop. If anyone wants the sources however they are welcome to them.