I'm installing a new 2TB internal drive at the moment, and want a good backup system for it. The plan is to back up to a 2TB external drive which will be kept off-premises. I'll bring it "home" to the office periodically to "sync" the files from the internal drive.

I'm looking for software that will, in effect, "watch" the internal drive for changes in files and folders, so when I periodically hook up the external drive, it can sync (mirror) the internal drives changes....without copying all the contents with every sync.

I know I have this capability with my HP PC, which I back up faithfully, so I'm assuming that most "backup" software will do this, but there are so many backup software packages available, I'm not sure where to start.

So, I'm starting with you guys: Is there a favorite, or an "old standby" in this category of software? I'm concerned about reliability and even ease of use over cost.

We use suresync at work to make backups from satellite sites back to HQ. We've never used the "always on" feature of it, though.

At home, I use Carbon Copy Cloner, but that's Mac only. So that's helpful.

Thanks, Ken. I should have mentioned PC, Vista 32 bit, with a likely change to Win 7 in a few months.

Naw, I knew you were on Windows. Suresync has been compatible with everything we've thrown at it, and they do update frequently. The interface is definitely hinky, but it might be worth having a look at.

You don't want to know what I use.

rsync

Listen to someone else, you don't want to go down this road (it's cobblestone, sure fully functional, but a bit old fashioned).

Aieeeee!

TSA: Your choice, we take naked pictures of your teenage daughter, or we feel her up and give her an STD.

syncback is free and it lets you customize your sync preferences, like frequency and time of sync. It lets you pick drives, folders, files, etc.

http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html

Hmmmm.... I might have another problem to deal with first: It seems as though I'm not having success in formatting the drive (NTFS).

The first time it ran 3-4 hours, reached 54%, then didn't progress over the next hour. I had to shut it down.

I then tried a quick format (twice) and it couldn't do it.

Thinking I must need to do another full format since the first attempt left it unfinished, I started another full format. Again, it seems as though it's reached about the half way point and has not been making progress.

I won't stop it now, in case it's doing one of those things where the progress bar isn't showing much, then it races at the end(!)..... but I'm beginning to wonder if I have a bad drive.

What was the old DOS line? Scandisk? Maybe I'll give that I try...

Adrien, thanks for the suggestion. It looks pretty good!