UsingAnyBackup

A quick guide on how to use AnyBackup

Introduction

AnyBackup is a pretty straight forward program, but it's probably a bit easier for me to say this, being the author, than an end user. So here's a rather long-winded wall of text with more information than you'll probably ever need to know.

Details

Two features you should be aware of before you do anything with AnyBackup are the skip list and valid extension list. These two lists let you control exactly what files are indexed when you add or refresh a drive.

• Go to Edit -> Edit Lists or hit Ctrl + E

• The window that pops up by default is the skip list
  • In this window you can define a regular expression for any files you wish to not index, so let's say you have a number of file that contain the word "Windows" you could skip them by doing the following
  • Make sure the drop down in the Edit Lists dialog is set to Skip
  • Click the Add button

  * Type in "Windows" (note if you know regular expression you could get more creative with something like "^Windows" or "Windows$", etc)

• The other drop down item are Valid Extensions, this list controls what types of files are indexed, by default ALL files are indexed, so if you don't want to index ALL files, please make changes here first!
  • Adding extensions is easy, select "Valid Ext" from the drop down list in the Edit Lists dialog

* Click the Add button and type in the extension you want, i.e. "avi" or "zip" or whatever file types you want, only enter one at a time, and you can add as many as you need/want

Now that we've got your skip list and valid extension list setup the way you want, let's move on to how AnyBackup handles drives.

AnyBackup stores drives in one of two types:

1. Backup Drives
2. Content Drives

Backup drives are added as a destination to copy new/missing/updated files from the Content drives.

Adding a drive is easy

• From the toolbar select Add Drive and select Backup or Content

• If you add a content drive you can either select multiple directories (using ctrl) under a drive or just select the drive itself

• For adding a backup drive you get a multi check box list of drive letters and drive names to choose from

• Note that even though you're selecting a drive letter above, AnyBackup will identify the drive solely by its volume name and volume serial number, so even if this drive changes letters in the future (i.e. this is a USB drive) it will still be recognized without any effort on your part.
• Network Drives if you are using Windows Vista/7/8 and have UAC enabled, you'll need to tweak a registry setting to allow access to network drives. That or turn UAC off. For further information check this link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee844140(v=ws.10).aspx
  • I have tested the registry changes in the above link, they worked fine for AnyBackup.

After you've added your backup and content drives you should now have an index of all the content (at least all the content allowed by your extension and skip list) on both drive sets. (Unless you skipped indexing, which isn't a great idea if you actually want to do a backup.) Now you can do what this program was made to do!

If you look at the bottom right hand corner of the GUI, you can see a string that says "Backup Mode" this tells you what mode AnyBackup is using for Backup drive allocation when backing up new files. By default it uses balanced, but you can also use sticky. Lets explore what these modes give you:

• balanced - this option tells AnyBackup to always choose the backup drive which has the most free space at the time of choosing, this has the benefit of keeping your backup drives even in terms of space available, but can also have a few potentially undesirable side effects:
  • Since it's constantly doing a most free drive selection, odds are your content will be divided up among your volumes (assuming they are fairly close in freespace) so even if your data is logically grouped together (i.e. MP3's) it'll get split up among the backup drives. If you don't plan on taking these backup drives anyway (i.e. to watch a video at a friend's house) you probably won't care about this.
  • More backup drives are likely to be used. If you are backing up a new album from your favorite band, it could very well happen that each song file ends up on a different volume based on the amount of free space each drive has. So rather than just throwing them all on one drive and verifying one drive is connected, it might prompt you to connect all your backup drives.
  • If you keep your backup drives hooked up all the time or if you don't have a large number of backup drives, this probably won't concern you. Even if you do have a large number it will prompt you specifically for which drive it needs and when.
• sticky -- this option tells AnyBackup to make a minor effort to maintain the logical grouping of your data. It's not a very extensive effort, in fact all it does is check to see if your target directory (the parent path of the file you're backing up) already exists on any of your backup drives, if it does, then it will use that backup drive.
  • This has the potential to cause imbalance in free space among the drives -- potentially to the point where one backup drive is almost full and another is nearly empty.
  • If the preferred drive above is found to be full it will fall back to the drive with the most free space, giving up on the logical grouping.

You can set this option by going to File -> Preferences and setting "Backup" to be either "balanced" or "sticky", if you want balanced you shouldn't have to do anything as that is the default option.

Before you actually perform any file operations, you can get a sense of what AnyBackup needs to do with a few handy commands. Let's say you want to see what files AnyBackup plans to backup.

NOTE -- when doing a backup or restore, AnyBackup assumes that your content drives will be hooked up, if they aren't, it will throw an error and abort the operation. It gives you far more leeway with backup drives which it will prompt you to connect.

• Select Edit -> To Backup or Ctrl+T
• AnyBackup will now analyze all the files on your content drives and compare it against your backup drives.
  • Be aware that when you do a real backup any files on your content drives that are not on your backup drives will be copied over
  • AnyBackup only cares about files in your set folders ("AnyBackup" is the default set), anything outside that directory will not be seen or deleted -- be careful, though! If you use the drive outside AnyBackup, it won't have an up to date idea of how much free space the backup drive has and it could attempt to put more data on a drive than it's got room for.

• If the above list looks okay you can proceed to back up your files
  • Select Edit -> Backup or Ctrl+B
  • AnyBackup will now copy over any new files from your content drives to your backup drives and remove any old files from your backup drives

So something awful has happened and you accidentally deleted some files from your content drives or, god forbid, a content drive has crashed. You can use AnyBackup to restore the missing files.

Note -- If a drive has died, you'll have to remove it manually by selecting the drive in the drive list and hitting Edit -> Remove or clicking the Remove button or hitting Ctrl+R.

• To get an idea of what files AnyBackup will restore you can use the Old Files option
  • Old files here mean files that are on the backup drives but not the content drives, this means files which are old and should be removed (i.e. during a new backup) or files which are gone due to deletion / a dead drive and need to be restore, it all depends on your perspective / situation.
  • Select Edit -> Old Files or hit Ctrl + O
  • AnyBackup now compares the files on your content and backup drives
  • If this list looks good you can start the restore!
  • Select Edit -> Restore
    • AnyBackup now copies all the missing files from your backup drives to your content drives

So next you've changed the files on your drives but AnyBackup doesn't see them. Why is this? Well, AnyBackup only indexes when you tell it to or when you perform a backup/restore. It doesn't tie into the operating system and it isn't made to run all the time, so it doesn't catch file events. (And even if it did, these file events could occur on other computers if you're using USB drives!)

It's easy to make AnyBackup get an up to date list of files on your drive (be it content or backup):

• Select the content or backup drive you wish to refresh
• Select Refresh -> Refresh Selected Drive
  • AnyBackup will now traverse the selected drive and index any new files / remove old files from its data
  • NOTE if the drive you selected above isn't connected to your system right now (i.e. it's a USB drive you have sitting in a drawer somewhere) AnyBackup will prompt you with the drive volume name and serial number asking you to connect it, obviously we can't refresh a drive that isn't connected to the system! Not without black magic.
• You can also use Refresh -> Refresh Content Drives or Refresh -> Refresh Backup Drives to refresh whole sets of drives at once, for each drive it will prompt you if you need to connect them, so don't worry if you can only hook up one at a time.

Finally, let's say you have all your drives in sync and your backup drives are sitting peacefully in a drawer somewhere. You decide you want to bring one of those backup drives to your friends house so you can transfer over some large files (linux distros, home movies, what have you), but you don't know what backup drive the files you want are on.

• Select File -> Search or hit Ctrl+F
• The search dialog allows you to do search types for string contains, starts with, or ends with, without the need to know SQL, but if desired you can still use a SQL string for something a little more advanced

• AnyBackup will find all the matching files across your content and backup drives and display them in the results window.
  • If you right click on a result file and then hit "show in content pane" AnyBackup will automatically populate the file view with the parent directory of that file, so you can see all the files siblingse

New in 0.9.5

• Sets
  • Sets let you create different backup sets which can consist of the same or different backup and content drives

New in 0.9.6

• Advanced search

New in 0.9.7

• Copy To
  • You can select files in the result pane and right click and select Copy To (Or Edit -> Copy To) and select a copy destination (i.e. a flash drive) and AnyBackup will prompt you to connect drives as/if needed

New in 1.0.3

• Guest View + Export
  • You can export (File -> Export) either your content or backup drives (or both) and create a file that you can pop onto a thumb drive or whatever you wish
  • This file can be consumed via AnyBackup's new Guest View (File -> Guest View) this opens a new read-only window which allows searching and batch copying.
• Drive Info
  • A quick drive summary + a visual pie chart of free / used space
• DEB packages for remote indexing
  • .deb files are available for installing the anybackup server for remote indexing as a service -- only testing on Debian 7.0 though presumably this will work on Ubuntu as well.

New in 1.0.4

• Chkdsk
  • You can have AnyBackup nag you to run chkdsks on your drives every x months (1-12)
  • AnyBackup will display a minimally annoying string next to the set chooser saying how many drives needs to be chkdsk'ed
  • A new column has been added to the drive panel displaying the last date a chkdsk was run
  • Chkdsk is run in the background, if bad sectors are found an error is displayed in the result panel advising you to run a more thorough (i.e. attempt recover bad sectors) chkdsk manually in Windows
  • The nag interval can be set from File -> Preferences (0 means never nag)

New in 1.0.5

• CSV export for file search results
• Use cx_Freeze instead of py2exe for compiled Win32 version

New in 1.0.6

• Give priority to backup drives that are already connected to system
• Find All Copies context menu option in content panel (finds all content + backup copies of a given file)
• Sortable tables
• Result pagination dropdown only shown when neeeded

New in 1.0.7

• Multi-Drive Summaries
  • Ever wonder what your total back-up space + usage is?
  • Select all your backup drives, right click and hit "Summary" and you'll get a high level over view vaguely like the "About" dialog for individual drives

New in 1.0.8

• Network Drives
  • AnyBackup recognizes network drives and will not attempt to run chkdsk on them, nor will it nag about them
  • Network drive volume names are created off the "Provider Name" rather than the reported share name, this allows support for multiple network drives mounted off the same share

And that's pretty much all there is to the program for now! I will add more as/if new features are added.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: matthew....@gmail.com

Finally I can backup my raid to external drives! Thanks so much for developing this.