Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on August 21, 2009 by CyberNet.

Windows only
I’ll forewarn you that DeltaCopy is something you won’t want to use for all of your backup needs because it’s not the easiest thing in the world to set up. It is, however, useful if you’re backing up large amounts of data every night that doesn’t change very much.

DeltaCopy is different than most other backup utilities because of how it handles incremental backups. Normally a program will check to see if a file has changed, and if it has it will update the file with the new data. To do this it will copy the new file over top of the old one, which for most people is just fine. When you start dealing with large files on a regular basis, however, this can take a long time to process.

What DeltaCopy does is transfer only the pieces of the file that have actually changed. For example, if you have a 1GB file and only 2MB of data has changed DeltaCopy will only transfer that 2MB instead of the entire 1GB file again. When you’re talking about gigabytes worth of data this can save a bunch of time.

The catch? In order to do this you’ll need to install both a server and client app on the respective machines. This is needed so that DeltaCopy is able to figure out what has changed in the file before transferring any of the data. So it does require some extra steps, but it may be worth it for some of you.

Aside from that the program is pretty basic and offers only the necessary features:

• Incremental backup – Copies part of the file that is actually modified
• Task scheduler – Profiles in DeltaCopy can run based on a schedule
• Email notification – Administrators can receive email confirmation on successful as well as failed transfers
• One-click restore – Backed up files can be easily restored.
• Windows friendly environment – No need to manually modify configuration files or play around with command line options.

I know this is just a GUI to the rsync command (ported from Linux/UNIX), but it makes the whole process a bit easier to manage.

DeltaCopy Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)
Note: If running this on Vista/Win7 make sure to install it to a location that has write access (meaning a location that UAC isn’t blocking write access to). I noticed that DeltaCopy writes configuration files to the install directory, and UAC will prevent that from happening if you install it into the Program Files folder.

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