Real time backup/file copier whenever a folder's content changes?

Question

I am looking for real time backup/file copier whenever a folder's content changes. So whenever a file's content changes or a new file is written or a file deleted, I would like to automatically have the same action done at the same time on a backup located on another drive.

Answer 1

Robocopy (which is part of Windows 7) can monitor a directory for change and make a copy.

• Use /MON:n /MOT:m for monitor commands
• Use the /MIR switch to make the destination a duplicate.

For more control but by no means a perfect solution use Belvedere

Answer 2

That's what DFS was invented for, provided you're talking about a server infrastructure. For a client system go with Dave Rook's suggestion.

I wouldn't call this "backup", though, because you wouldn't be able to restore an accidentally deleted file (which is one of the scenarios backup is supposed to mitigate).

Answer 3

You can't strictly speaking do realistic 'real-time' backups except by using a Mirror RAID (and that isn't really a backup) - this is where you have multiple (2 or more) identical hard drives in the same computer. Whenever data is written to one, the same data is written to the other.

It protects against hardware failure, but not unintentional data loss (accidentally deleting a file) since deleting a file performs the same operation on the mirror drive(s).

In which case you probably want to combine it with a very frequent incremental backup to an external drive which most OSs (including Windows) have built in.