I use the free version of Reflect to back up my C: drive, but I’ve decided I would also like to back up a handful of folders, found elsewhere, a weekly basis, keeping several copies going back a month or so (incremental naming). I’d also like to back up the same folders on-demand to an external HDD I only hook up for that purpose.
Have you used any software for this purpose that you would recommend? Googling around, there’s a lot of things to read and not many of them are directly related to folder backups, but more full-disk backups. My google-fu is weak today.
Cheap/free is preferred. Something with the features I listed, but NOT so packed with features that I need a CIS degree to use it. Finally, something light on CPU/RAM resources is always good.
While I don’t think it has incremental naming what you could do is set up several profiles so that profile 1 starts today and repeats every 28 days, profile 2 starts a week from now and repeats every 28 days, etc. Such profiles would be easy to set up as you simply create one profile, copy it–and them modify the copy… Likewise you could have a profile not scheduled for your on-demand copies.
PS. On re-reading your post I am not clear on what you mean by “found elsewhere”.
If you are OK backing up to the cloud (which is quite a bit more reliable, though much less private, than an external hard drive), Google Drive, SkyDrive (integrated into Windows 10), and Dropbox all offer free tiers. You can choose any folder(s) you want and it’ll automatically keep them backed up. They’re light on CPU and RAM, typically, but obviously could be heavy on bandwidth depending on how many files you want to upload. Of those, Dropbox is the lightest because it has a special way of syncing only the changes within files, whereas the others will reupload the entire file if any bit of it is changed.
If you want automatic folder backups to a local hard drive, Windows 10 actually has that built-in through the quick and efficient “File History” system. Plug in a hard drive, enable it for the folders you care about, and Windows takes care of the rest: How to back up files with Windows 10's File History | PCWorld
Again, this is smarter (meaning more space-efficient) than backing up an entire folder week after week, because it accounts for duplicates/unchanged files and just stores the changes rather than copying the same files over week after week even if nothing has changed (in backup lingo, this is called delta or incremental backups; the tradeoff is that they are more space-efficient but less resilient, because if you lose part of your backup from hard drive corruption, you probably lose all of it. But the chances of that actually happening in the real world are pretty slim).
Generally the rule for reliable (but nonconfidential) backups is that you should have something at home and also something offsite. JungleDisk and Carbonite both do this, backing up your files BOTH to a local hard drive and to a cloud service of some sort.
Don’t want to use a Windows solution. In my Googling about this, I read where they supposedly got rid of some backup option built into Windows for the Creator’s Update. Not looking to sign on with them after that.
I’d prefer 4 discrete backups. More space, but I have it, and I’d prefer 4 options when things go sideways.
Create a DOS batch file, that uses XCOPY to backup the specific folders you want to your external hard drive.
If you want to get fancy, add commands to first create a folder on your external drive named Backup-20180429 (automatically inserting the current date) and then XCOPY all the desired folders into that directory.