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I have an external hard drive, and I want to back up my computer to this drive. As I'm doing it for the first time, the following question have cropped up in my mind:

Consider the situation that I already have a backup in the external hard drive. Now, after quite a number of days, I decide to run another backup. Now, if I run the Windows Backup, will it check for any existing backup and then add to the previous backup, only those files that have been modified or added after the last backup, or will it create a completely new backup of the whole hard disk?

If Windows Backup does not check for existing backup files, then is there any other better software which checks with previously backed up files? It becomes tedious in trying to copy files to the external drive, so I felt running a backup would be better, but only if it provides this functionality.

My computer is running on Windows 7 Professional 32-bit, with 4GB of RAM.

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There are numerous tools that can be used to create backups which only copy changes

Examples include

  • robocopy
  • xcopy
  • rsync
  • unison

The first two are likely to be present on a Windows PC. The last two are cross-platform and are useful for both local and remote cross-platform backups

They all have configuration settings or command line options for backups with minimal data transfer.

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