Hi All-
I have an EEE PC which only has 4gb drive and I have an 8gb sd card where I have portable apps suite on. I only had 1gb left on my pcs drive and after i tried to backup my portable apps from the sd card to my pc first then i tried to a network drive I only have 100 mb left and the crazy thing is the backup failed to complete twice and I dont know how to get the 1gb space back on my pc that the portable apps backup took away. I looked in the backup folder but nothing is in there. where could this huge file be?
Please help!
THANKS!
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I guess my new question is how to backup my portable apps from my SD card and if so how do I do it so it will complete the back up and not take up so much space that I cannot spare?
thanks!!
thats possible.
Cause 7zip has to create a temp folder where it writes all the stuff to.
And if your sd card is too full you wont even be able to back up as you dont have enough space on your hdd.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
With so little space, and limited ability to upgrade or add storage space, you will need to be judicious in your backups.
The apps themselves can always be downloaded and re-installed, so you really don't need to back them up.
Your documents, of course, need to be backed up.
Your personal settings for your apps also needs backing up. You can either try to find out which files contain the settings (ini files, for example) or only back up the apps that maintain personal settings, like Firefox and Filezilla.
If you have broadband access and free secure webspace:
I found an interesting program called Cobian backup on the portablefreeware site.
http://www.portablefreeware.com/?q=cobian&m=Search
It actually has an option to back up directly to your own site using ftp!
I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you.
Thanks for all the information! It is very much appreciated!
I guess I might not be doing this correctly.
Do I back up to my SD card or my computer? Say I have an 8GB card with 3GB on it so far if I do a backup to the card will the backup be 3GB? And if so will it write files to my computer as well as the SD card?
does that make sense?
thanks!!!
The backup will most likely be less than 3GB, but if you're going to back up to the card, I just wouldn't back up at all.
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." - Rick Cook
most of the time you back up to your computer.
maybe you could back up to your card but that would increase read/write cycles and maybe the drive would choke cause of the amount of traffic.
And I think that even if you tell it to back up to your drive, 7zip would write a temp file to the computer and copy that to your sd card after completion.
I think the best would be (if you card isnt to full) to find a friend with more space on his pc and do the backup there and then use the sd card to carry it home/ move it to a external drive/whatever.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
see this is what is confusing me. i have another pc i could back it up to and i tried to do it with a network shared drive i have but the files are still being written to the temp of the small spaced pc.
i will just back it up on another pc. but again i guess my question is if the card has 3gb used up do i need 3gb of space to back it up?
thanks!!!
it will always use the temp folder of the pc your on.
I dont know if you can tell it not to use it and somme other place instead.
no not 3gb but the space of the final archive. That depends on what files you have, if they can be compressed a lot or not. I have a 2gb drive with 300mb free space and the archive is 1 gb. so it really depends. You´ll probably need 1.3 to 2 gb of free space...
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
thanks for all the useful info!!
One last thing. I want to try out Firefox 3 if i backup full first and firefox 3 doesnt work out can i just restore the back up which would have firefox 2?
thanks!!!
but you dont have to back up the whole drive just for that...
see here for a easier way.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
Ideally you want to back up from one physical device to a second physical device. So if you have good data on your internal flash drive, you'd want to back it up to the external SD drive, or vice versa. If you only have space on the SD drive, you might make the backup file there, then copy it to another device (e.g. your home computer).
The idea is that if the device fails (even Flash drives can go south) you don't lose your good data AND your backup, because your backup is on a different device.
7zip has a -w (set working directory) parameter. You could set that to whichever drive has more space, if you are using 7zip by itself. Not sure about the PortableBackup or Toucan. I suppose if you are desperate you could change the TEMP directory variable to the device with more space on it (e.g. the SD drive) before attempting the backup; theoretically, if it has been set (from My Computer | Properties | Advanced | Environment variables) before you start PortableApps, everything should use that new Temp directory, including the backup.
That would also be where to look for any files that are suddenly taking up all your free space.
There are some network backup services that offer 2GB space free for personal use (as a loss leader for their commercial offerings, probably). That might be something to look into. That way your backup would be stored on an entirely different computer somewhere. Of course you'd need to install their program, which might take up more space.
Good luck.
MC
THANKS rab040ma and Simeon!
One last thing to make sure I got it becuase it didnt work yesterday when I tried to back up I guess maybe cause i was out of space.
I will back up on a computer with a good amount of free space on it. Will the temp file be moved on completion to the portable apps folder or do I need to delete that file from temp?
thanks
the temp file will be moved to the location you wanted the Backup file to be.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
thanks