Changing name of large folder causes headache when backing up

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Posts: 11
Joined: 30 Oct 2018

adios

Hi.
I use FFS for backing up folders and drives.
There's something that I encounter often which gives me a headache, and I'm wondering if there's a simple way to avoid it.

I'm a bit of stickler and I usually want to go over any changes when backing up, especially if it has to do with deleting files from the backup. If an important file was accidentally deleted at some point from the source drive, I wouldn't want to then delete its backup from the backup drive, since that's the whole point of the backup. So I make sure I know why a file is being deleted before committing to the changes.

The headache occurs when I happened to have changed the name of a folder that contains a lot of files. When running FFS to compare the source drive with the back up drive it will reflect that name change by suggesting to delete the long list of files from the backup drive and then essentially copy over the same long list of files from the newly named folder on the source drive to the backup drive.

So in order to make sure I'm not accidentally deleting a file from the backup that for some reason doesn't exist on the source drive, I have to go through the long list of files, one at a time, and cross-check to make sure all the files being deleted do in fact exist in the folder with the name change and will be copied with the newly named folder, over to the backup drive.

Is there a way around this? Is there some way to detect when a folder being deleted from drive B and a folder being copied over from drive A to drive B is a essentially the same folder with the exact same content, the only difference being the name of the folder?

It would be great to know if there's some way to avoid having to manually check each file.

Thanks!
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Posts: 2286
Joined: 22 Aug 2012

Plerry

Check out the Detect Moved files feature.
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Posts: 3606
Joined: 11 Jun 2019

xCSxXenon

Using mirror for creating a backup is a bad idea as well, for the reason you stated. If it gets deleted from the source accidentally, then it will be deleted from the backup. You might be interested in keeping files only on target folder unchanged to circumvent that.
Posts: 11
Joined: 30 Oct 2018

adios

@Plerry, thanks! That's exactly what I was looking for.
@xCxXenon, yeah I'm aware, but I'm afraid it'll get too messy if my backup doesn't mirror my source. If something were to happen to my source drive and all I'd have is my backup, I wouldn't know what's what. Sometimes I purposely delete files for a reason and I wouldn't want those to be in my backup.
In some cases I do use incremental backup, when I need version control. But generally I use the mirror function.
Anyhow, thanks guys!
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Posts: 2286
Joined: 22 Aug 2012

Plerry

In FFS you can use Mirror syncs in combination with Versioning.