A great PC backup utility

[danaltick]

One other caveat I've noticed with GBM mirror jobs that may be worth mentioning.  You may want to create a separate mirror job for each bucket in your archive, as I have done, and keep your old mirror jobs around as you move to new buckets and create new mirror jobs for them.  By doing this, if you ever decide to go back and re-sync an older bucket, all you have to do is re-run that old mirror job.

The other way to do this is to create one top-level mirror job for all the buckets on the disk, but only check the current bucket for mirroring in the job editor.  In this case, if you ever wanted to mirror an older bucket again due to changes you might have made in the archive (e.g. ACR adjustments to DNG's), you could edit the job and select the earlier bucket for re-mirroring.  However, if you do it this way, because the bucket was unchecked and rechecked, GBM will mirror the whole bucket again as opposed to just re-syncing it, taking much longer.  I'm afraid that's just the nature of the beast.  Therefore, I recommend the first method.

Hope that makes sense to all you Windows users using GBM.

Best Regards,
Dan

[drmrbrewer]

I'm trying out GBM.  One thing I am testing is incremental in combination with rollback.  I created a test folder with some files in it, ran the incremental, followed by deleting a file or two, then running the job again, and so on.  Since rollback was enabled, I was hoping I could select one of the previous states in the rollback list for the backup job, and it would restore all files that were current at that point.  But it only seems to restore the files that are current after the final rolback state, i.e. the current state.  So if I start with 10 files, and reduce them gradually to end up with 2, I only ever seem to be able to restore those final 2, whatever rollback state I select.  Am I doing something wrong?  I know I can probably restore the others manually (through the Catalog), but shouldn't I be able to do it through the Restore function?

Thanks,

Mike

[danaltick]

Mike,

I noticed the same problem.  Apparently GBM defaults to the latest one unless you actually pick it by browsing to it on that same page.  I don't think it should work that way, so I will mention this to Genie-Soft the next time I speak with them.  Thanks for letting me know about this.

Dan

[drmrbrewer]

Thanks, Dan.  I decided to test out their email support with this and another question I had, and I'm impressed.  Top notch.  The restore/rollback issue has been spotted and before (perhaps through you?!) and will be addressed in the next release.  It seems that GBM7 is due out "within the next few months", but their support contact said that even if I bought GBM6 now then I could upgrade to GBM7 for free.  They now have another sale, and if life were fair then you'd have earned yet more commission from your recommendation!

(My other question related to whether you could determine the size of an incremental backup before actually performing the backup.  My motivation here was to use such a forecast in combination with an incremental backup to DVD, so that you could determine whether and when it is worthwhile performing such a backup; e.g. I'd rather not waste an entire DVD on what turns out to be 100MB of fresh incremental data.  In view of iView's tardiness in fixing the Catalog Set scripting issue, and in view of me wanting to set up a proper DVD backup strategy now, I'm going to try incremental backups to DVD in place of buckets, virtual or real.  No doubt such an approach would have issues for you and your setup, but perhaps for my lesser and less rigorous requirements it will suffice, and certainly require less manual maintenance and setting up.  I'll cross-reference this to the "virtual bucket" thread since this issue relates less to this thread and more to that.)

Mike

[danaltick]

Here's Genie-soft's reply:

Dan:   question

Dan:   Can you tell me if GBM is able to determine the size of an incremental before creating it.  Thanks.

Genie-Soft Help Desk:   yes.. how may i help you

Genie-Soft Help Desk:   yes it does.. in order to determine the size needed to perform the backup and if there is available space on the media selected

Dan:   is it able to do even for compressed incrementals

Genie-Soft Help Desk:   yes.. for all backups

Dan:   ok thank you very much.  Had someone at a forum asking me this.  Wasnt' sure how to answer him

Genie-Soft Help Desk:   no problem let me know if u need nething else?

Dan:   sure will...have a nice day

Genie-Soft Help Desk:   u too

[drmrbrewer]

Dan, thanks.  I see it.  In the Confirming Data Selections window that pops up initially, you get the estimated backup size.  It gives you 10 seconds to bail out if you want, then it continues with the backup.

Very good.

Mike

[Hendrikvdv]

For just plain back-up I vote for Nero BacKItUp. I use it and it works great and easy.

[danaltick]

I just noticed that www.genie-soft.com has released version 7 of Genie Backup Manager.  They asked me to help beta test for them a while back, but I've just been too busy; so if anyone decides to give it a try please post your impressions/results.  Thanks.

Dan