I'm looking for suggestions to do automatic backup of folders/files to my ReadyNAS, similar to Dropbox but without the cloud. Specifically, I'd like to have a program that runs on my laptop, monitors a folder(s) for changes and then propagates those changes to a specified folder on the NAS. I know there are tons of programs like AllWaySync and SyncToy to do the sync manually, and I could run those with Task Scheduler to run daily or whatever, but I'd like to make it even simpler. This means a program running in the background and monitoring changes in real-time.
If you're truly doing this for Backup, as opposed to making an updated file available across-your-network i.e. to other PCs, then I question that you'd want to alway "propagate changes". What if you've messed-up a file, or deleted it, on your laptop and need the last version--your "continuous backup" has the bad (or no) file on it to (try to) recover from.
I use syncback to backup my files to my NAS every day, keeping a week's worth of files before over-writing. Then I backup each month. So I have 7 plus 12 or 19 sets of files on my NAS at all times.
On my main computer with critical files I also have a 32Gb USB3.0 thumb/flash drive. For a laptop I'd think a flash drive for "continuous file backups" might be nice as it's with you whether connected to your network or not...
If you're truly doing this for Backup, as opposed to making an updated file available across-your-network i.e. to other PCs, then I question that you'd want to always "propagate changes"...
I agree that a continuous backup scheme needs to be able to roll back to previous versions and also recover deleted files. Otherwise you have no protection against user error - and your protection against disk failure is also not as strong as you'd want. For instance if a directory gets corrupted so no files are seen, you wouldn't want the backup to irrevocably delete the files on the copy.
Thanks everyone - good points. I have used SyncBack Free in the past; I just took a look at the features for the SE verison and it looks like it will do what I want. It says it supports versioning, so between that and the automatic backup (I think it works the way I want, I need to try it) I should be all set.
