How do I back up an external hard drive

Support
#1

I want to backup several directories (C:\users, c:\wamp\www, c:\backup, etc.) that are on my hard disk, but I keep the bulk of my pictures on an external hard drive that I connect only when I am working with them or when I want to back them up.

How do I go about including those in such a way that they won’t be seen as deleted if the drive is not present?

(I think I could set it up with a manual mklink to put it into my directory tree, but then it seems like it will appear empty – besides, that sounds like a lot more work than I really want to do…)

#2

You could create a distinct repository (using “duplicacy init” with a different “snapshot id”) for the external drive that uses the same storage. You’d get the benefit of deduplication across your entire dataset but you’d be free to back them up on different schedules.

I have not tested this but it seems implied by the docs.

#3

Sorry, this is probably a totally dumb question…

What docs?

I saw the Guide, but I did a brief google and poked around in the sources on github and explored the rest of the web-site here (as far as I can tell) but I’m not seeing anything else that looks remotely like documentation.

What am I missing?

#4

I have only used the command line version and the documentation seems pretty good to me.

The section I was thinking of is this documentation for the init command:

“The snapshot id is an id used to distinguish different repositories connected to the same storage. Each repository must have a unique snapshot id.”

There are other sections that refer to using different repository IDs for backing up different machines to the same storage. But it should be equally valid to back up different directories to the same storage also. You would just have to initialize each directory independently and back them up independently.