I admit, I do not do too many backups. But when I do, it usually takes hours because half of my 200GB is a single Folder of mp3 files. Music, Books, and whatever else, comes to 102 GB... Every time I try, I cannot find a way to exclude that folder, which I keep on a seperate HDD for security anyway. Is there a way? Thanks
Old and decrepit, I use DOS copy and xcopy commands. I have several batch files that run minimized on a schedule of my choosing (or on demand) and put directly usable files on a second and third internal HDD. With a batch file, you choose exactly what you want to backup. The process is somewhat slow for xcopy (still faster than Windows 7 built-in backup) since I get all my user folders and files, but it has no effect on performance and I seldom even notice it running. I also batch copy files to an external HDD but that's less often. Since these files are simple DOS copies, they can be read directly by the program in which they were created. The few times I've needed to recover files, I just went and got them. The one time a computer utterly failed, the backup drives were put in a USB enclosure and read directly. I much prefer not having to have a special backup and restore program to get to the backed up data. The data is not compressed, but large capacity HDDs are cheap.