I used FreeFileSync for the 1st time today. My plan had been to backup files from my hard driver to a folder on a backup hard drive. I thought that I had been setting the software to just had updated files to a backup hard drive. Instead, the software deleted files from both drives. The software deleted all of the files from my user directory on my computer. It also deleted all of the files in a USER directory on the backup hard drive.
My backup drive is a 2 TB drive and had almost 10,000 photos from several years on it. My backup drive is not intended to be a clone of the computer hard drive. Instead it is an alternate storage location which also holds copies of files from my computer hard drive. The idea is that if I have a hard drive problem, it will be on my computer hard drive and not a backup drive. I was able to recover some of the files which had been on the backup hard drive, but not all. The backup drive is in a RAID tower with 12 TB of hard drives. Some of the files and photos on ythe affected drive are backed up on alternate drives, but again not all. I am probably lucky that this software did not do more damage. My computer's hard drive had 300 GB of files on it's 1 TB hard drive.
I had used alternate backup software a few days ago and was able to reconstruct my computer's hard drive. But many of the files on the backup drive have been lost. In fact, I have no idea how many files have been lost on my backup drive. I do know that my backup drive now has 200 GB of more space available then it used to. And my photo directory and some important document directories on this backup drive are missing....
Needless to say, I uninstalled this software as soon as my computer hard drive was repaired.
Dangerous software!
- Posts: 2
- Joined: 21 May 2016
- Posts: 1
- Joined: 21 May 2016
I assume the deleted files were not placed in the Recycle bin.
This is one of the best feature-rich backup software available for the money.
I abandoned Acronis after several years to fully rely on FreeFileSync to backup my systems.
As with any software that is so flexible, one needs to be very careful to not simply accept the defaults and to first configure the Synchronization Settings to be precisely what you want it to accomplish. I learned this lesson the hard way too, but fortunately not with the loss you experienced.
I found that the "Two way" Synchronization Settings the most tricky mode and not what I really wanted as a "backup" solution. I learned that customizing the mirror variant enforces one to pay attention to the specific Action desired. I have had an issue with the Versioning with Time stamp Naming conventions (a "Delete files" mode) where it unknowingly created files names that are so long now, that I'm unable to delete the files from the file system (Windows 7). That said, this software has been working great for me once I took the time to understand and configure it properly.
This is one of the best feature-rich backup software available for the money.
I abandoned Acronis after several years to fully rely on FreeFileSync to backup my systems.
As with any software that is so flexible, one needs to be very careful to not simply accept the defaults and to first configure the Synchronization Settings to be precisely what you want it to accomplish. I learned this lesson the hard way too, but fortunately not with the loss you experienced.
I found that the "Two way" Synchronization Settings the most tricky mode and not what I really wanted as a "backup" solution. I learned that customizing the mirror variant enforces one to pay attention to the specific Action desired. I have had an issue with the Versioning with Time stamp Naming conventions (a "Delete files" mode) where it unknowingly created files names that are so long now, that I'm unable to delete the files from the file system (Windows 7). That said, this software has been working great for me once I took the time to understand and configure it properly.
- Posts: 2
- Joined: 21 May 2016
Yes, the Recycle Bin was the way that I recovered many of the files from the drive. However, when I noticed the Recycle Bin full, I incorrectly assumed that the files had been transferred to my computer's hard drive before being deleted. So I started to Empty the Recycle Bin. After this process started, I started wondering what the source had been for those files and stopped the process. It was at this point that I realized that files had been deleted from my backup drive. It was a point that I had not considered up until this point.
(I am running a Linux system.)
(I am running a Linux system.)
