Recomendations for a program for backing up files

All my personal files (Documents, Movies, Pictures and Music) are on an internal 2 GB HDD, Drive D. (The C drive is on an SSD). In case of a fault I need to have a backup of those personal files. I would prefer that backup to list those files in the same way as the D drive does. For example, folders which are named Documents, Pictures etc. This makes it easy to retrieve a file from the backup if the list of files has the same structure as on the D drive. An example of what I want is in the attachment.


The simplest way to keep such a backup up to date is simply to periodically delete all the folders on the backup and copy on to the backup all those folders on the Drive D. But that is clumsy because it involves re-copying files that have not changed (the majority are in that category), and is slow. Much better would be a program which compares the backup with the D drive and makes changes to the backup only as necessary to make it display identically to Drive D.

I have used FreeFileSync which seems ideal, but it gets into a muddle and is now giving messages that it can't handle some files other than simple doument, picture etc. files which I didn't know existed. I make backups of my system using EaseUS ToDo which works well, but it does not produce the simple list as described above.

Any ideas on a suitable program please?

Dalchina.

Thanks. I am runnung right now a newly-created Macrium BU of my D drive (it will take 4 hours). When setting it up I specified one full BU per week and four differential backups. My hope is that during each week there will be 4 diff. backups recording changes, and when the next weekly full BU runs the old one and its diffs will be deleted. Is that right?

I am also hoping that if I need to restore my D drive, the restore will be up to date by, say, a couple of days at most (following my setting of 4 Diffs along with the Full: 7 divided by 4 (or is it 5) being 1.75 days). Is that right?

Many thanks for your help.

dalchina said:

If you want on-the-fly backups, Windows offers File History, but that won't provide a browsable view of backed up files as you seek.

Actually it does. See: Control Panel > File History > Restore personal files