Backup, Versioning, Mirroring

[Dale]

I have a question about backup of working files. Here's the situation, which is pretty much Figure 6.24 in the book...

• P Drive is main drive for working files (external)
• E Drive is physical internal hard drive (2nd drive) holding backup of working files from P drive
• T Drive is rotational external hard drive holding backup of working files from P drive

I am using SyncBack Pro and verifying the copies. I like the fact that it keeps the files in native format so corrupted proprietary files are not an issue.

Question One
Should the P->E and P->T be backups, versioned, or mirrored?

The figure in the book shows mirrored, and my preference is mirrored. One reason is simplicity which is highly important. When I rename a file or move it on P, I have a clean copy of what's on P. Another reason is that it keeps the backups from filling up. A third reason is that if you had to do a complete restore you wouldn't have to go through and weed out old files.

My fear is this. I once synced a directory between my computer and my son's (using the precursor of Windows Live Sync if I recall right). One of the hard drives crashed; it thought all the files were deleted from the drive; therefore it deleted them off the other drive as well. It put them all in the recycle bin so they were recoverable, and I had a backup anyway. But if the backup is a mirror, then I'm concerned about propagating a failure if the P or E drive crashes.

Dale

[patrickcorrigan]

I don't use SyncBack Pro, but generally the advantage of versioning is that if you accidentally delete or corrupt a file you have the previous version available. With mirroring corrupted or damaged files can be mirrored (assuming the problem isn't a disk error) and deleted files are deleted from the mirrored drive as well.

Patrick