How to Backup Folders

Folder backup is a flexible approach to data backup, where the amount of files being backed up is not constant and can change from time to time. Folders are elements of file system that allow organizing data logically, either by their belonging to certain application, or by other criteria. If your backup plan includes backing up a folder, then you can't exactly predict how much place the backup will occupy after its execution: everything will depend on how strongly its contents changed.

Over time, people have developed several efficient approaches that allow optimizing the process of backup. Let's illustrate them with an example where you need to back up a library of digital photos.

• You create a backup job, select a folder containing photos, and choose where you want to store the copy.
• Firstly, it is recommended to enable filters for PNG, JPG, GIF and other types of pictures so you can back up photos and skip all other files that may exist in the same folder.
• Then, you can enable incremental backup which makes each task execution process only new and updated files, skipping the old ones.
• Finally, some tools provide a helpful option to store backups with timestamps, so you can always know the dates you can roll back to.

This way, instead of rewriting the entire folder to a selected place each time the task is launched, you will back up only modifications that took place since the previous time. This is folder backup optimization at its best!

When choosing a backup software, remember that many utilities keep backups in proprietary formats of their own, which doesn’t allow restoring data without the use of the program. For such task as folder backup, this is hardly justified: in case of an accidental file deletion it is much more convenient to restore it manually, instead of launching a program and creating a backup restoration task.

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