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Can Toucan copy without zipping?

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December 19, 2010 - 4:33am
#1
CuriousD
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Can Toucan copy without zipping?

I have been looking into back up programs as I have migrated from WinXP to Win7. I had EZbackitup previously and did not know if a program last updated in 2004 would be suited to back up a computer on a new OS. I noticed that this program had a nice interface, but like a number of back up programs, it implements a compression format. Aside from saving space, why do back up programs compress or bundle the back up files as a zip file (or other formats)? Can one mirror the files as if we were copying all the files directly to an external drive? Can Toucan be programmed to back up without zipping?

I read the previous post about non-zip back up, but when I saw scripting, that was beyond my level of tech. I have photos, family videos, music and other files totaling around 600GB thus far and I'm looking to back it up in a way that will allow me to simply copy files over if I needed to rather than restoring it with a program.

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December 19, 2010 - 11:34am
John T. Haller
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Sync

If you don't want it packaged in something, then what you want is to sync your files, not back them up. Toucan has sync built in.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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December 20, 2010 - 3:05am
(Reply to #2)
CuriousD
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Thank you for the suggestion.

Thank you for the suggestion. I looked into sync programs and found that they do not sync more than one folder at a time. Of course, I may be using it wrong, but I couldn't get them to work in such a way so that various folders from different locations could be copied on to one external hard drive with a one clock solution.

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December 20, 2010 - 9:10am
(Reply to #3)
Darkbee
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Multiple Sync Jobs in Script

You can create a "script" to run multiple (sync) jobs in Toucan. That would be a one click solution. I've not yet used scripting myself but I'm led to believe it's fairly simple, no advanced programming language knowledge required.

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December 20, 2010 - 2:43pm
CuriousD
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Thanks for the reply. I

Thanks for the reply. I don't know how to script. Does the scripting and file syncing copy the address or file structure? Does it copy folders rather than just the contents of the folders?

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December 20, 2010 - 3:06pm
(Reply to #5)
Darkbee
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It works like this...

Sync jobs in Toucan copy folders/files according to criteria that you provide such as whether a file has a different file size, modified date/time etc. Sync jobs can be used to make a source and a destination folder structure including files the same (equalize), or to make the destination an exact copy of the source (mirror). There are some other options too, however syncing only works for one folder and its sub-folders in the source. So if you want to run a sync job for folders/files that do not share the same parent folder then you would have to create a separate sync job for each one. For example you want to synchronize folder1 on drive C: and folder2 on drive D:, those would have to be two separate sync jobs.

To avoid the need to start both those jobs separately you can use scripting which is built-in to Toucan. While the scripting in Toucan is a full-blown scripting language (LUA), you need not be a technical/programming genius to use it. You can create a simple script that will run multiple (pre-defined) sync jobs in click of a button, something like:

sync(jobname1)
sync(jobname2)
sync(jobname3)

And that will simply run three sync jobs in order using the job names that you specify in parentheses.

Does that help you out? I'm trying to explain it as comprehensively, yet as simply as I can without being insulting.

Have you run Toucan? It would probably make sense to you if you opened it up and played around with it a bit, just doing some simple testing on a few dummy files/folders until you get comfortable with the application.

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December 22, 2010 - 4:26pm
(Reply to #6)
CuriousD
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Yes, I will have to play with

Yes, I will have to play with it to see. Hopefully, I can muddle my way through the scripting. Thanks.

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December 22, 2010 - 8:47pm
(Reply to #7)
Darkbee
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good luck

All the scripting you need is right there in my previous post, that's it, no more to it. At least if you only need to do something as simple as running a few sync jobs.

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