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I've got many hard drives. However I cannot find a decent application to keep two partitions in sync (master-slave).

I've got:
2x 2TB
1x 500GB (USB/External/Portable)
1x 500GB (Boot, Win7)

1x 400GB (Not used)
1x 640GB (Not used)

I use my 500GB External one everywhere I go. Therefore when I hook it up to my desktop I'd like it to sync (in the background) with my 640GB (partitioned at 500GB). I'd never make changed to the backup directly only my portable hdd (master-slave).

I might get a 60GB SSD in 3 partitions (Win7, Ubuntu, NTFS Storage) and use this in the same sense as my 500GB portable. When I boot my desktop up I'd like it to sync to three backup partitions)

I would also love it if the backup application also supported Ubuntu.

Any suggestions? Thanks :)

My aim is to have my OS's and some data (500GB) portable. And when hook back into my desktop it will sync on ubuntu and windows7. Of course I'd have my 2x 2TB for mass storage on my desktop.

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  • The question as presented I find a bit confusing, but realistically the preferable backup method is going to depend entirely on how you want to be able restore your data.
    – Garrett
    Commented Dec 8, 2011 at 23:18
  • Any decent online disk imaging software that does disk to disk copies, should do the trick. If they can't read the partition, they should and do a simple raw copy. For efficiency's sake, also make sure they do incremental backups.
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Commented Dec 9, 2011 at 0:02
  • I'm also not sure I completely understand your question, but it seems like rsync would be quite sufficient (although I don't know how to make it sync automatically when you plug the external drive in, I'm sure there's a way to do this).
    – user55325
    Commented Dec 9, 2011 at 0:05

3 Answers 3

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What you need is not a backup software but a sync software. I think Robocopy is what you need. It is a console program. If you rather want to have a GUI you can look at RichCopy. Both tools are from Microsoft.

Both tools will do file based synchronizations. So you will have to define what directories you want to have in sync.

I would recommend you to have only the data partitions/directories in sync. I would always reinstall the operating system from new if there is a problem where the OS is not even starting anymore. Because often there will be the problems in the backup/synced directories as well.

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  • Anyone ever used Delta Copy?...aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp
    – Moab
    Commented Dec 9, 2011 at 1:12
  • Yes, I did use DeltaCopy once. But it was less stable on my Windows server than RichCopy. It could be better now but I was not satisfied back then.
    – Raffael
    Commented Dec 9, 2011 at 10:47
  • Late to the game here but DeltaCopy did not sync all the directories I was expecting it to, a situation I only discovered after my laptop was stolen.
    – Ian
    Commented Mar 17, 2019 at 17:06
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MirrorFolder looks promising

Also have a look at Delta Copy

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For the sake of completeness, let's add SyncToy and Unison to the mix. Unison of course works across multiple platforms, http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/download/releases/stable/unison-manual.html#afterinstall

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