It is to my knowledge that the os your working with does not have rsync out of the box, therefore you’ll need to go thru additional measure to get that working.
Thanks. Some definitely report using rsync in Win10/11, and I didn't see mention of loading any 3rd party support for it in Windows, but I guess that's possible.
I do not have the VSS option check for my specific case. My task runs every hour during working hours. I have seen when a file was open it was skipped because it was being worked on/opened. For my use case this was fine as it would eventually be picked up in the next hr and usually the file had been closed at that point.
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I run engineering simulations that can have the same file(s) open continuously for up to a week at a time. The software makes automatic saves between calculation iterations, so it would be nice to have this captured by backup. Unfortunately, when I tried to check VSS, ABB reported: "Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) is not supported. Refer to this article (link) to check the VSS agent is installed on the server."
I do have VSS enabled on this drive in Win11, but perhaps there's some small detail I missed. I will be checking on that today, but for now it is un-checked.
Some do it for the peace of mind and backup is a good strategy to have. It won’t be Until the almost never happens and you don’t have a backup is where that will sting for the rest of your life if it had important data on it. I know someone that had to pay 3k for a usb external drive that had photos of their kid from birth to teens.
You misunderstood me. Of course I backup all user files. But I was referring to the act of backing up a full drive including OS, drivers, applications, etc. That extra stuff can inflate the total multi-versioned backup size by 50% for many users, and at best it saves a little time in restoring the rare new machine experiencing a hard drive failure. Usually, a failed hard drive is an opportunity to upgrade the machine or OS, before restoring user files onto it.
And of course I know there are good reasons for doing full-metal backups it in
some cases, such as comment about more quickly recovering from ransomware. But even then, it might be safer to load OS and applications fresh, rather than chancing restoring one containing the Trojan that caused the attack in the first place. Some ransomware Trojans can sit dormant on a machine for days, weeks, even months, before deploying, so it seems like the probability of restoring from an infected backup is real if the admin can't identify and specifically scan for the origin of the attack.
UPDATE: I set up six backup tasks yesterday, on three machines. Three of these tasks was to backup c:/users, minus *.pst files, and the other three were to backup "c:/users/Outlook Files" on a less-frequent schedule. Of these six tasks, only one completed, one of the Outlook Files tasks. I think I can blame the power settings (Sleep Mode) of the corresponding PC's for some of the "Failed" or "Partially complete" results, but one of the "Partially Complete" responses came from a PC that never goes to sleep. Time to find and dig thru some log files.
I have "Wake on LAN" enabled in the device settings of all machines, which I'd think should prevent sleep during backup, but perhaps it does not. If anyone has a good solution to this problem, short of setting every computer in the house to "Never" sleep, let me know. I could schedule a task on each PC to keep it awake during backup time, but that's an awful lot of schedule jockeying among various machines, too prone to getting hosed up later if changes are made to backup schedules.
