Solved Auto sync internal HDD to external drive

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SuperSaint13

PCHF Member
Aug 27, 2024
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Hi,
I wonder if anyone could help please?
I have just saved a large amount of photos from my PC, running W10, to an external drive as a backup.
Is there a way I can automatically synchronise the external drive to changes I make on the PC HDD?
Many thanks in advance.
Dave
PS - could any suggestions be step by step guides please, I'm far from being technically literate 🙂
 
You'll be needing to use some sort of backup/sync software to work out what files have changed and copy those ones to your external drive.
Win10 also has a built-in File History option that will do what you want as well.

See my signature for some backup software suggestions.

As to automating that process, while it can be done, I personally don't like letting some program have complete control of my backups.
Did that once, thought all was well until one day a found out that for some reason the auto-scheduled backup was not working, and hadn't been for months.
So I manually initiate my backups and wait for them to complete.
 
A personal word of caution with FileSync, I was going to suggest it as well but had a bad experience with it.

I have always used ViceVersa, yes it's paid-for and I realise not everyone wants to buy software so I took FileSync for a spin and used that for a few of my clients PC's if they ever wanted free backup software.
This one client was using it for about 6 months, had some hard drive errors and needed to recover some files from the backups. I tried to find said files only to discover they were not in the backed up set.
I could find no reason why they would have been skipped but suffice to say my confidence in FileSync was shattered and I never used it again.

I will put the caveat in that this was easily (at Least) 10 years ago, so who knows how many version releases there have been since I last used it but this cautionary tale ends with - if you are going to use it, continually check the destination location as much as you can that all your files have been transferred, until you get a warm fuzzy feeling of trust. 👍
 
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I use Microsoft Synctoy - It is no longer supported by Microsoft (no updates).
I have written a small batch file that is connected to a shutdown shortcut on the desktop.
When I shut down the computer it runs the sync first, updates the files then shuts the computer down.
 
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