I am trying to create an backup solution for a Windows machine. I have grown to really like the SimpleLinuxBackup solution I have on the rest of my machines. It is simple (obviously) and performs both full backups and incremental backups.

There are five characteristics I need …

1. “what to include” - directories and files to save; needs to support wildcards
2. “what to exclude” - directories and files to skip; needs to support wildcards
3. “since last backup” - support a timestamp (saved after the last successful backup) as a filter of what to backup on the next iteration
4. Create a single compressed file (using formats like ZIP, 7z, or GZip) containing all files selected for the backup
5. Free or reasonably price

On Linux TAR does all of this and it does it nicely. I just use the following:

tar -czvf outputfile.tar.gz timestamp -I file-with-include-list -X file-with-exclude-list -N=file-with-timestamp

All of the version of TAR I have found for Windows either has bugs related to the first three features or the documentation is so bad/void, there is no way to diagnose the generic error messages they spit out.

Most Windows solutions rely on the “archive bit” but that is not a reliable mark for what has been backuped with incremental backups.

So, what backup tools do you use ? What would you suggest?

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Posted in Backups, Linux, Windows |

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