Am I F****D?

I can offer you two backup products and they are free.

SyncToy, a Microsoft product

and

SyncBack, by somebody else.

I've used SyncBack for years. We have some users at work that use SyncToy and they like it. It does not have as many features as SyncBack, though.

Did I mention that they are free?

 

Err, F*** off.
Might be Ok, but I would not trust Them. Will it still work 10 years from now?
(on topic, this is the fword thread)

 

oh dear, I might have beaten you to it in the aircraft recognition quiz

 

Will something you actually purchase work 10 years from now?

Not sure what you are referring to by "it," the application or the duplicated files?

Will the application still function? I don't know, I'll have to check my tea leaves for that one.

Will the files be available? I don't see why not, all the program does is automate what you could do by hand, which is a function that is completed by the OS, which I am guessing in your case, Microsoft probably also created and you paid for. The files themselves are not changed in any form. Certainly seems a lot safer than asking Mr. Google to hold on to your files for you and hoping that they [a] don't rifle through them decide later on that they are proprietary, you don't actually own them anymore and they are going to keep them.

 

Not sure Wiki can always be trusted, but this:

"SyncToy is a freeware tool in Microsoft's PowerToys series that provides an easy-to-use graphical user interface for synchronizing files and folders. It is written using Microsoft's .NET framework and uses the Microsoft Sync Framework".....

"A significant weakness of SyncToy, including the latest release, is that it does not notify the user of conflicts in which both copies of a file have been modified. It simply uses the latest version and overwrites the oldest. Without proper notification, the user could lose important changes on the older version."

answers the questions for me!

And if anyone has shed loads of research on DOC, DOCX or Excel, I'd recommend additional plain text and CSV backup at some point.

 

It is not a big dick contest, Geoff; I was offering suggestions. Take them or leave them.

 

TODAY IS JUDGEMENT DAY AND IF THE GODS HAVE LOOKED FAVOURABLY ON ME ::

 

Not F****d just B*****ked quite a bit.....

IT company has just rung, most if not all Images have been saved but they are just that,images and there is around one million of them. All the files they were have gone !

 

Andy,

Very sorry to hear the News.

It will mean a lot more hard working sorting all the Images again.

Do the Images still have your unique camera ref number attached.

If yes, then you may be able to find a Programme to arrange them back in the order that they were taken. At least a start for you.

Regards and good luck.
Tom

 

I know someone that is having 9 months maternity leave soon, so it will give her something to do whilst she is off work and I'm slaving away saving lives

On a more serious note the IT geeks have said the images have retained their original info including date and time taken so I'm having them put in date order and work through them that way when I get the hard drive back next week. Anyone who has had files off me will know I use the bright yellow 'readers ticket' as the first photograph so they should make identifying the start and finish of each file easier.

 

Andy, one thing to bear in mind with the 'date taken' exif data is that it's only accurate to a second. So there are likely to be instances when two images have the same time code. Just make sure whoever is sorting them out takes that into account and doesn't overwrite one image with the other.

I would suggest renaming an image with the time code plus the image's current filename. For example if there is an image with the current filename of "A0000001.jpg" taken on 1 Sept 2013 at 14:30:01 rename it to "2013-09-01_14-30-01_A0000001.jpg".

If they can't do it or want to charge you heaps of cash give me a shout and I'll knock up a simple Windows programme to do it for you.

But if you're lucky the images would have been recovered in roughly chronological order anyway as the drive had been used exclusively as a store rather than lots of writing and deleting of files.

 

twats

That's exactly what I did but I thought it was the disc drive and I was formatting a DVD. To be fare I had been up since 4am and had just pulled a 12 hour shift at work

 

Picasa maly very well help you to sort them.

Be sure to make a copy of the data before you begin, even if you have write it to DVDs. Don't work off of your only copy of a file.

 

Lee - I have been considering using your services to sort out my images. Would this be something you would be interested in?