Free File Sync and Backup

I live in dread that my PC will suddenly cease to function and I’ll lose all my work. In spite of taking daily incremental backups (I use Macrium Reflect for those), what I would really like is to have complete, uncompressed, unarchived, ready-to-run copies of all my data files on a second PC. So if PC Number One goes wrong, I can just switch over to PC Number Two and carry on working. As I have a lot of data – video files for my courses, document files for my books, plus images, program code and all sorts of other stuff, I really, really don’t want to lose anything.

So recently I’ve been using a rather fine file-copying program called FreeFileSync. This lets you synchronize copies of folders and sub-folders. That means that you can, in principle, have two complete copies of your data and let FreeFileSync work out which are the most recent copies and then update any out-of-date files by copying the newer versions over them. In that way you could work on the same data on two PCs and let FreeFileSync synchronize them.

With FreeFileSync you can create named backup sets and synchronize groups of subfolders across two computers.

In fact, my requirements are a bit simpler. I want one ‘working set’ of data and one copied set of data. So instead of synchronizing in ‘two directions’, both to and from my two PCs, I just want it to keep a ‘backup copy’ on PC Two updated with any changes I make to the files on PC One.

It does a pretty good job of this. My initial backup (340Gb of data over 131,549 files) took over ten and a half hours to complete. Thereafter, however, it only copies any changed files. To do that it does a file comparison which takes just a few minutes and a file copy which again takes seconds or minutes. If you need to maintain multiple copies of your files, I recommend that you try out FreeFileSync. My main criticism, so far, is that it doesn’t have a built-in scheduler. So if you need to do automatic timed backups, you are going to have to do a bit of extra work using the Windows Task Scheduler.

My initial backup was huge as this chart (which shows backup progress) proves. Subsequent backups are much smaller and faster.

Even so, this is a useful tool to have. After all, disaster has a habit of striking just when you least expect it. And you really can’t have too many backups!