comparing multiple drives for back up

[sound-lab]

Hi,

I use free files sync at home and I love it. I have two external hard drives, one is my project drive and the other is my backup that has a mirror of the project drive.

I would like to implement this at my work. We are running 3 editing studios running all external hard drives. We would like to at the end of the day connect all drives run a comparison on all drives, then whatever is added on each drive that day will be backed up on all drives overnight to have 3 mirrors.

Is this possible? I saw a topic where you can back up the internal drive (A) to the external drive (A) but nothing this crazy lol.

Keep up the great work on the program.

[Plerry]

You can simply select whatever left (generally: source) and righ (generally: destination) base location of each left-right base location pair. And either of the two or both can be a local drive or folder, an external drive or folder, a network drive and/or folder or a cloud location.

[sound-lab]

Hi Plerry,

we have 3 editing drives we need to mirror all of them at one time.

Can Free file sync be able to look at all 3 drives at once and mirror them?

basically, all 3 drives are the source and also the destination.. Hope this makes sense lol.

For example: Drive one has logo-v1.png but drive three has car.png they both need to be on all drives.

[Plerry]

You should not be running multiple FreeFileSync (FFS) instances simultaneously (on the same or on different machines) against one or more overlapping remote and/or local locations.
But you can very well run a single FFS instance on any machine, as long as it has read and write access to all local and remote locations in the sync. You can sync the three locations by defining multiple left-right base folder pairs.

[xCSxXenon]

You would probably end up running an update sync six times. This way each drive will copy it's contents to the other two, without deleting anything. Do that for each drive as a source, and they are all synced up. This will be nice because you can have a single sync do all six pairs and it shouldn't cause any conflicts/overlapping
A->B
A->C
B->A
B->C
C->A
C->B

[sound-lab]

Thanks, guys for all your help in this.

xCSxXenon -

If I'm backing up A to B and B has files that are not on A and I'm mirroring would this then delete the files that are on B? or if I'm adding the sync like you shown as one sync when I hit compare it will compare every hard drive and be backing everything up together, and not be doing one sync at a time ?

[xCSxXenon]

Don't use 'mirror', use 'update' like I mentioned, which will avoid deleting files altogether. Now, if you end up wanting to delete data, you can run a mirror sync, with the same setup as above, {i}after[/i] you run the update, and then the deletions should be mirrored as well. I would recommend setting up a test folder on each drive and test this, but I can't find any possible issues

[sound-lab]

Thanks for all you help in this. I will try this out.

Do you know if it's possible to have it run the update and then a mirror?

We start a daily backup every night before we leave and let it run overnight. It would be great to have it run both overnight

[xCSxXenon]

You could have a post-sync command that runs after the update finishes. This command can be typed out to run the mirror sync

[sound-lab]

Hi xCSxXenon,

About the post-sync command that runs after the update finishes.

How do I set that up? is this something we do outside of FreeFileSync ?

[sound-lab]

I also just thought of something. If I do an update as you mentioned above. If I delete a file on DRIVE B for example and I'm updating A to B first would that file that I deleted from drive B then be updated back to B? and not apply the changes someone made?

What I'm trying to get at here is that each drive has changes each day from adding new files to deleting files, i would like to make sure that the changes made throughout gets changed, that's from deleting files to changed name files etc.

Is the best bet for this is getting all editors to make note of what they deleted and after the backup each editor then deleted the files that were meant to be deleted ?

[xCSxXenon]

In FFS, the settings for the sync jobs contains the options for a post-sync command.
Oh yes, I do see the problem you described though. I'll keep pondering on hopefully finding a soulution for you though!