Back-up for the forgetful

That's me, Kristiansund, June 2008

I'm atrocious at keeping routines over extended periods. I often drift off doing something else and can easily forget to do something, even if it's something I do daily. Backing up my files is no exception. I've been 6 months or more without doing anything and then need a whole weekend to catch up. No longer. Now I've got the NAS box, I've been looking to make things more automated, especially so that I can get back-ups running in idle time due to my slow network. The back-up software I use is AllwaysSync (free for "moderate use" - after about 400GB of back-up it locked me out and asked to pay for a copy, $30 well spent). I'd had it configured for timed back-up, which can be a problem with power management, and also auto-on-connect for my external drives, which was a problem if I connected the wrong device (back-up being based on drive letter assignment). Then I found the magic setting.

Now I'm set for auto-on-idle. The software monitors the folders set in the auto jobs, when new stuff is written and the folders become inactive, it runs the back-up in the background. As I'm backing up over a network, I don't see any hit in normal operation. If I was working on the files to be backed-up, AllwaysSync would just wait for me to finish. In the week I've had this setting active, I've not missed a sync and not had to intervene. Perfect for the forgetful/lazy man.