Don't want backup to keep old or renamed files

I am a photographer and have 1.5 TB of images in my Pictures folder on Windows 7.  I have 350 sub-folders under it, all full of big RAW and TIFF files.  If I rename a folder, backup keeps the old one and duplicates the new one.  So potentially 100 GB of data in a renamed foldercan be unnecessarily duplicated on the external backup drive, this filling the drive very quickly.  If I reneame a folder, edit an image in Photodhop of delete a photo, I have no desire for the backup program to keep the old files on the exterbnal drive.   I would rather that it mirror the files in some way.  I don’t need the old deleted or edited files or folders.  I have set versions to “1,” as low as it will go.  For example, I deleted 150 photos yesterday but all 150 are still in the backup drive. 

How can I ger WD backup to stop retaining all those old files?  I just want it to backup the curent file and folders, or duplicate the files on my C drive.  Because of this problem, my external drive fills up twice as fast as it should and is full of dead files that I would never want to recover.

Thoughts? 

The WD software is for back-up, not synching. In that sense it is working exactly as it should, but not in the way you want (you want a synched mirror rather than a true backup). A true backup should keep everything, regardless of whether the file is currently on the original drive or not (via deletion, renaming, moving etc).

So you may be better off looking at a different software solution for that. There are several around, some of them have been mentioned on these boards in various threads but you may be better off doing a search and looking around for something that may fit the bill (it’s not something I have looked into, hence I can’t make any recommendations).

Darren,

Thanks for that.  I agree.  WD does a great job of what it is intened for.  I am aware of what you advise.  But I’m caught in the middle.  Many photographers have various RAID systems that provide mirrored drives and increased speed and redundancy. But for reasons I won’t get into here I want to stay away from RAID for now.  Besides, with RAID you still need to backup your data to an external drive kept off-site.  

I really don’t want to sync.  That software is to sync between devices. I want a pure backup of my existing files and folders.  But I don’t want old folders and files that I have deleted or if edited the original version to be kept.  I do too much editing and moving around of files for that.  I would really just like the software to once a day just dupliate whatever is in my Picures folder and even “My Documents”  and not keep all the old files that have been changed or moved.  That is the backup I desire.   

Think of it – I had a 600 GB folder full of thousands of RAW files and I simply changed the name of the folder in 4 seconds of work and after 6 hours of grinding I end up with two 600 GB folders – the old one and the renamed one --both with the same 600 GB of files in them –  and that little 2TB WD external drive grinf=ding away filled to capacity.  Or I finish a shoot and delete 200 shots and they are all still there in the external WD drive backup simply because they were there at one time… 

I’m obviously missing something, as that sounds just like sync to me. Essentially you want, once per day, to have the folder on your WD device become a mirror of what’s on your PC, am I correct? For me, that’s sync’ing (one-way synch, from your PC onto your WD device).

No back-up software would ever delete a file from its archive just because it has been deleted from the original one (from deletion, renaming or moving). Indeed the recovery of such files is generally one of the most used features of the backup (at least in my experience).

Or am I misunderstanding something here?

Greg,

Did you ever find a solution for this issue?  This is exactly what I’m trying to do.  I want my renamed files / folders on my HD to be back up to the WD drive and the original info on the WD drive to disappear thus avoiding duplicates.

TIA for any insights / solutions you can share.

GregJohnson1956 wrote:

I am a photographer and have 1.5 TB of images in my Pictures folder on Windows 7.  I have 350 sub-folders under it, all full of big RAW and TIFF files.  If I rename a folder, backup keeps the old one and duplicates the new one.  So potentially 100 GB of data in a renamed foldercan be unnecessarily duplicated on the external backup drive, this filling the drive very quickly.  If I reneame a folder, edit an image in Photodhop of delete a photo, I have no desire for the backup program to keep the old files on the exterbnal drive.   I would rather that it mirror the files in some way.  I don’t need the old deleted or edited files or folders.  I have set versions to “1,” as low as it will go.  For example, I deleted 150 photos yesterday but all 150 are still in the backup drive. 

 

How can I ger WD backup to stop retaining all those old files?  I just want it to backup the curent file and folders, or duplicate the files on my C drive.  Because of this problem, my external drive fills up twice as fast as it should and is full of dead files that I would never want to recover.

 

Thoughts?