I went looking today for a FOSS solution to synch my photo backup drives and it seems I have found it with FreeFileSync . If I speak from ignorance, feel free to criticize, but the download link is here
Have others used it or have recommendations they would like to share?
I found it some years ago for my wife who runs a mixed Windows - Linux environment and she wanted one app to avoid mistakes instead of getting tangled up in rsync and robocopy arguments.
Anyway, great app, does what it says.
Highly recommended.
Absolutely phenomenal tool.
Battle-tested for me in a prior job where I had to migrate machines from XP to 7 keeping user data and appdata.
Use it now on Linux as well because I value the file hash check after transfer to ensure file integrity.
Do note that “syncing” and “backup” are mutually exclusive terms. Your synched copies are an extra redundancy, but they are not a backup.
Never tried FFS, but syncthing is also excellent.
I use both, FFS for copying pics/raws to NAS (from W10 and Linux). And syncthing for copying pics/raws from phone to Desktop. Both use cases Just one way, no syncing.
syncthing is a cool tool: I take photos with the phone and when I’m back home the data will get transferred to my desktop without any effort. Fully automatically. I like this.
Ahem, what?
“[…] a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event.” — wikipedia
While wikipedia is surely not the end-all of knowledge, that is pretty much what the world agreed upon what backup means. Syncing to one or more disk is one way to achieve that. If you want those terms to be mutually exclusive you will need to provide your very own definition of the term backup. Please elaborate.
I don’t care too much about the terminology, but it is great to have free software that backs up and synchs my external drives. However, I too thought synching was backing up. I even used it to synch (backup) my google drive which Google decided in a moment of madness to no longer support synching for. I guess they believe we all live in a cloud.
If you only sync files, you get the same (good or wrong) files across all your synced devices, this is better than nothing, but it’s not a backup.
An example: let’s suppose you accidentally delete a file that is synced. The file ends up deleted in ALL your synced devices, and then you can’t recover it.
A backup should be an immutable snapshot of your files across the time.
Syncing, for this thread, for softwares like FreeFileSync or syncthing, propigate changes from the source to the target continually. You can configure some safeguards, like keeping deleted files in a trashcan for some period of time. If you accidently delete files from the source, then that deletion is propigated to the targets. This provides file redundancy in a similar way that a RAID array does, but neither are really a backup.
A backup is a point-in-time copy of a set of files. If I make a backup today, and delete all my files tomorrow, I can still restore files from the backup.
Very important point!
“A sync is a point-in-time copy of a set of files. If I make a sync today, and delete all my files tomorrow, I can still restore files from the sync.”
You see … a sync is just one type of doing a backup.
When you look a little closer, all backups are syncs with more or less elaborate overhead and metadata, some of them even protect against simple human error. There will always be an better idiot than the one anything was designed against.
Just for reference: I have cascading syncs of at least two generations for all my data with incremental backups branching off at some points in that scheme, including regular rotations to offsite locations that are cold storage in waterproof cases - so I consider myself knowledgable enough to talk about it.
Personally, I use rsync for a local backup of my raw files, and borg-backup for local and remote backup of everything else. Borg is really amazing, specifically because it has survived multiple operating system switches (including Windows, Linux, and macOS), without having to rebuild the entire backup. It just recognizes that the old files are now in new directories, and keeps on trucking. Thus, I have one continuous, unbroken history of my files across different operating systems. That’s pretty amazing!
Exactly. Sync is redundancy – not deletion protection, while backups are recoverability to a point in time (RPO / RTO).
We went round and round with a customer (law office) who wanted to merely sync their brand new Symantec Enterprise Vault to a remote location – over the Internet, no less – instead of backing it up. Fortunately that garbage EV never worked we’ll enough to go to production so the issue was ultimately avoided, albeit with much weeping and gnashing of teeth before the inevitable finally happened. One of those “never ever do that again” exercises. I think that one project was fully as bad as half of my previous 13 years as an enterprise backup admin combined.
If you can’t asks questions in good faith and without being smug and pedantic, then just don’t participate.
FreeFileSync is more flexible in this regard than you’re stating.
Have you used it yet? You might find that it can in fact make backups.
I haven’t but its similar to syncthing in that it can do one way syncs, and while that will give you backup, it seems a bit too easy to screw up.
FTR (and to clarify my comment), in the enterprise backup context I was referring to, syncing is rarely a one time thing. It’s an ongoing continual process that either syncs on a frequent interval (poll) or on demand (push) when data changes. A such it’s usually impossible to retrieve (i.e., restore) previous versioned data from a sync. By the time you discover it’s needed, it’s gone. That’s what makes it different from true backups.
The term has been somewhat co-opted by home market software to refer to triggered or otherwise scheduled / infrequent disk-to-disk backups.
Getting back to the point of my original post I just wanted to share that I had found a free program that seemed great at synchronizing my backup external drives. The software allows one way or two way synching. They use the term synchronizing. What I have chosen to synch is my backup external drive of images and google drive from the web. I use the term backup because to me that is the purpose of the drives and google drive for me. This discussion sadly fell into a rabbit hole about correct terminology and its use. That was not my intention.
I am sure we all want to protect our images from loss and that is what this program has facilitated for me. In my case my previous laptop died a sudden and unforeseen death. It contained many images both RAW and edited. I bought a disk reader (great investment) and have been able to recover my images from the failed laptop. I have been able to use FFS to compare what was on my dead laptop and what was on my external backup drives (my terminology) and have recovered my images and editing work. My documents were all stored on Google Drive to facilitate working on different computers and locations so I used FFS to import a copy of those files to my new laptop. I really don’t care if the correct term is synch or backup.
Lets all just have a good weekend and chill out.
One key point, without getting into semantics, you should develop a way to have a copy of the images not in your house. Either have copies of disks at the office or family member house or in the cloud. This keeps the files safe in case of a fire, flood or zombie attack.
I’ve been using Kopia to maintain an off-site copy of my server (documents, images, etc) into backblaze B2. It is very inexpensive ($1.05 last month for like 200gb) and encrypted.
100% agree and that was the motivation for my original post. I live in a bushfire risk zone. Having external drives stored elsewhere is one of my aims. Having my documents in cloud storage like Google Drive or my University’s system means I don’t panic when I see a blue screen of death.