Backup 101, General practices + Beyond Compare specific

News & General Discussion
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A little while ago I asked around for some version control/back up software suggestions. I tried a lot of things and in the end went with Beyond Compare 2, mainly for it’s ease of use. The main thing I needed to do is backup art asset files.

Well the software is super simple and I am using it without any issues. However, when I poke through the documentation most of it is like Greek to me. So I have that anxiety that I might not be doing things quite right and suffer for it later. I was going to ask @Martin_H a few questions directly, but there may be others here who also use the software and could benefit from a dedicated thread.

Okay, so to the questions. Some of this might be general best practice stuff, but some will be specific to the Beyond Compare software:

  1. Folder Merging.

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    If I merge the Left folder to the right Folder, what happens is that any differences are found in the binary of the files within each folder, and where there are differences the left replaces the right. This works for any files that are in binary (like maya files), but not texture files or some other things. This is correct?

  2. Non-binary files that cannot be merged must be copied over. Correct?

  3. Files that are copied over, if they share same name as another, is it overwritten? I don’t get any kind of message indicating what will happen here. (I can test this myself to confirm. If nobody else answers I’ll post what I find soon.)

  4. Best practice workflow? What I am doing right now is this:

Three folders. 1. Working folder is located on my local harddrive. I do the work here.
2. Backup A. This is in dropbox.
3. Backup B. This is also in dropbox, but ideally it would be separate location, such as an external HD or some other cloud service.

At end of day, merge/copy files from Working to Backup A. Test a couple files after the merge to ensure it went through clean. Then if that is okay I send again to Backup B.

Does that sound right? It is a little time consuming. Maybe like 20-45 minutes at the end of the day depending on how many new files to upload. Is that reasonable time expense for the benefit?

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Are you sure it’s 2? It should be 4 if you just bought it.

I have never used merge, so I’m guessing you’re better served if I just tell you how I use BC, because that’s probably how you want to use it too. The function I’d recommend is keep your working directory always on the left side of the folder compare window, and use the “Update Right” function to copy files to your backup folder. The toolbar at the top does not show all available functions, it can be customized like this:

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You can also find that function in the menu under actions → synchronize → update right.

“Update right” copies files from the left folder to the right folder (including all subfolders etc.) and if the file on the left is newer than the file on the right, the one on the right gets overwritten. If the file on the right is newer, it won’t be overwritten. If a file is deleted on the left, but still present on the right, BC will leave the file on the right alone. There is a different action called “mirror” that would delete such a so called “orphaned file” in the target directory.

I recommend to create a folder in your backup folder, that makes it super obvious that this is a backup location. E.g.: I have a mostly 1 to 1 copy of my working drive on another drive, and on that other drive the whole folder hierarchy is in W:\backup. My reasoning is that if through some freak accident drive letters get swapped around, I need to always be sure which drive is the working drive and which is the backup drive.

Manually checking a couple files to see if all went well is good, but possibly even better is letting BC do a CRC or binary compare every now and then. You can set that up in the comparison rules of your “session”:

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I never do that though, because it would take hours.

A “session” is e.g. a folder compare that you’ve set up with certain rules, and you should use the session manager to save those sessions. So you’d for example have 3 sessions “quick backup to A”, “quick backup to B”, “CRC comparison backup to A”, and use the first two daily and the CRC comparison on Sunday morning for example. It’s up to you how often and how thorough you want to do these things.

One more gotcha that I can think of is when you back up files to a remote location, like cloud storage etc., there is a chance that beyond compare doesn’t have the ability to copy files over without changing the “modified date” of the file, to the “upload date” of the backup. So for example you save a maya project on the 5th, back it up online on the 6th, and run the backup comparison again on the 7th, then BC will think that the file on the remote location that was uploaded on the 6th, is newer than your local file last modified on the 5th. As far as I was able to find out, there is no solution for that if you use FTP or webdav. If you use Dropbox it may not be a problem, I’m not sure.

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thanks Martin. That clears up a lot for me.

About the modifying of the dates, so far I think that isn’t a problem for me, I’ve still been looking through individual files kind of carefully because I don’t trust everything entirely yet. I will double check just in case.

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oh, and it is beyond compare 4. dunno why i thought it was 2.