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| Results of Backup Scan | Results of Summary Command |
Backup is a Windows program which allows backup of a system hard drive, or portions of it, to protect against crashes or other loss or corruption of data. The Backup program allows you to back up all of a hard drive, or specific subdirectories of it, to an external hard drive which can be stored in a safe place. The program performs an incremental backup; i.e. only the files which have changed since the last backup are copied.
The content of a backup is controlled by a Backup Specification file. This file specifies a source and destination directory, and also a list of filenames/filetypes and directories to be excluded from the backup.
A particular strength of the Backup program is its handling of orphan files, which are files or directories which exist in the destination directory, probably as the result of previous backups, but do not presently exist in the source directory. Orphan files can accumulate over time due to deletion, moving, or renaming of files and they can severely complicate the task of recovering from a crash. After a restore, you may find your desktop cluttered with humdreds of obsolete files from past times, and will need to sort painstakingly through them to determine which ones are current and should be kept, and which ones are old and should be deleted. The Backup program allows examination and selective deletion of orphan files so that you don't have to deal with hordes of old, long-deleted files reappearing when you do a restore.
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| Results of Backup Scan | Results of Summary Command |
The download file is an installation program. Download it to your hard disk and double click it to unpack the program and its help file to the current directory.
Before running Backup for the first time, it is a good idea to read the Help file for advice on how to set the run parameters of the program