Caley

It’s been a long desk with the unwelcome distraction of having to chase up long over due invoices.
Anyway got there in the end.
Until recently I had a very simple and effective back up solution for critical data; a Maxtor One Touch external hard drive. It came with simple but reliable software. You could set it up to do differential backups at a certain times every day (or hour for that matter). If you created new data files within the designated folders it had the sense to think I have never seen that one before and it backed it up. Even more clever; if you dug back in to some old project and made some updates to a job done two years ago it detected the slight change and also copied that across too. This type of minor file edits are the kind you would never remember to do manually. However it didn’t burden itself by copying everything that hadn’t changed’ or it would have been whirring away 24 7.
Enter Windows 8 and the software no longer works. You can still drag and drop data with a file manager. Maxtor got taken over and no longer exist and the software does not receive updates either. I have just bought what I thought was a direct replacement Seagate 4tb device. (I feel very vulnerable depending on manual backups each night.) The description said it came with backup software and was the main reason for the hardware choice. I can’t get it to work –I have been trying all night- and further research on various forums suggests no one else can either. It does not seem to be able address large volumes of files and folders and the initial back up stops at 5% every time. This is the same problem many other folk found.

The Maxtor drive was a brilliant device and there does not appear to be an equivalent for 2014.

Windows 8 does have a utility built in but it does not offer any flexibility over which folders to backup and I have now downloaded a dedicated app which I will buy at the end of its demo period if it does what it says on the box.
What else. Mrs SJR is at Inverness with the girls this evening. I think they have had a nice day. I did break away from the desk mid morning at Caley’s request as he was keen to do some athletics in the field.