Anybody using Lazy Mirror on Win7?

I have been looking for a reasonably easy-to-use sync with versioning software to back up Windows PCs to a NAS. I have looked at Genie Timeline, OopsBackup, AutoVer and Yadis Backup and have issues with each of them, although Oops seems to be the best of the bunch.

I have recently run across two more freebies, though: EVACopy and Lazy Mirror. Of those two, Lazy Mirror seems to be really close to what I am looking for in terms of managing the archived versions so I am curious if anyone on this forum has been using it, particularly with Windows 7. I don't want to use this to backup the system since I use Macrium Reflect Free for that - I want this only for periodic backup of user files.

Thanks

 

I have no experience of Lazy Mirror I'm afraid - what is the management of old versions that you want to achieve?

 

If you can't find a sync program that works for you, perhaps take a look at Areca Backup, a free file-based backup program that handles versioning well.

 

I seem to be looking for Genie Timeline or Oops Backup, but I was also interested in any freeware which might do the job. Genie and Oops both allow only one backup "job" per user, which has different implications for both programs.

For Genie, it means that compression is applied to all files or no files - no way to compress those files which are compressible but ignore jpegs and the like. On the other hand, Genie has file deduplication so it should not store multiple copies of the same file.

Oops doesn't handle shared directories which may be contained in different users' backup jobs, so you can end up with multiple copies of the same file (no deduplication). On the other hand, it does allow per-folder tweaking of the backup parameters like the reverse-delta feature.

These aren't show stoppers, and I am leaning towards Genie because the archive seems to be easier to navigate if you don't have access to the GUI (e..g if you need to recover the files directly from the NAS). I know there have been complaints of Genie being slow, but enabling "Turbo mode" at least during the initial sync speeds things up considerably.

The lack of reverse-delta may also be an advantage; I don't know how reliable Oops is and what the chances of data corruption are.

Lazy Mirror and EVACopy look like they can provide similar functionality (without the slick GUI). The issues I am seeing are that they need to rescan the entire directory tree which can be very slow when dealing with tens of thousands of files.

 

I actually found the opposite to be true, at least for the most recent version of files - unlike Genie they're not mixed in with older versions in the same folder.

Me neither, but the most recent backup is at least always the 'whole' one - though that doesn't mean it won't be corrupt of course.

I agree that none of these programs seem to work quite how you want them to. I ended up wishing NTFS had versioning built in and abandoned the quest.

Have you tried Syncback SE or higher? I don't know if it will do all that you want, however it has lots of options. Some other programs I found that were 'almost right' were True Image (non-stop backup) - either 2014 or the 'lite' 2013 version, Syncfolders, Secondcopy, AJC Active Backup, and a few others which I can't remember now.

 

Tried OzSync?

 

I know that SyncBack is highly regarded by many people but somehow I never really liked using it. I looked at a bunch of others but I have not heard of ozSync until now. I will also have to take another look at FreeFileSync.

 

Let me state up front that versioning has never been important to me.

That said, I use GoodSync daily for keep my flash drives in sync. I have been running it for several years and I trust it completely. I know it can handle versioning but I know nothing about how it works in that regard. It's not free but IMO, it's well worth the money.

I also use SyncBack SE and Pro occasionally. But again, with no versioning involved.

**EDIT**
I forgot that I had used Genie in the past. A couple of years ago, we used a version of Genie Timeline between a PC and a NAS box for work. After we discovered the PC drive was running out of space (due to tons of files in the Genie data folder), we decided to use something else. We switched to GoodSync there and have been much happier. (We may well have had Genie set up wrong but with it's confusing GUI, that was no surprise (hopefully that's been addressed in current versions.)

 

I'm interested in versioning in the case of somebody deleting or messing up a file they decide they really need to get back. In that regard, a Time Machine clone like Genie or Oops looks ideal because it is "set and forget", and retrieval (if needed) is also fairly straightforward. My impression of both Genie and Oops is that the paid versions look very good, but the free version of Genie is too limited to be of any real use (backup runs every 8 hours and no automatic cleanup of old versions if the destination runs out of space).

FWIW I looked at rdiff-backup and there's no way I can see a home user mashing out the command line to recover a file from last week. Then I tried JBackpack (rdiff-backup GUI), but rdiff-backup crashed after a while; it is also not encouraging that the latest dev/unstable version of rdiff-backup is dated 2009.

Of the freebies, FreeFileSync (FFS) seems to be the best one I have tried because (a) its scan speed is very fast and (b) it supports moving deleted items into a separate versioned tree. There is no true incremental real-time sync (i.e. sync only the files which changed, instead of using the file change notification to trigger a full rescan), no automatic cleanup of the archive by date, and no built-in scheduler, but I'll see how it works to run a FFS-generated batch file every 30 minutes or so.

ozSync looked good, but for some reason it insisted on copying one of my files in my test directory every time it ran, and that was a 3+ GiB file as well.

Lazy Mirror was looking promising until a manual comparison using FFS showed that it missed a bunch of files.

I am also playing with BitTorrent Sync to sync my desktops with the NAS, so there is some safety there using the .SyncArchive folder to save deleted files. Unfortunately BTSync still has some issues (e.g. 2 desktops sync with the NAS fine, but when I added a notebook it would not sync any of the existing folders, thought I could create a new sync folder pair between the notebook and the NAS).

 

Maybe this recent thread can offer something for you...
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=351743

If you are interested in checking out "rsync backup", my translation of the vbs file into English can be downloaded here: (link in the old thread is dead)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/en2qbv



Cheers
manolito