Documentation of Exiland Backup
Step 5. Where to save backups
Here, you can select the storage folder(s) in which you wish to store your backups
The appearance of this step of the wizard depends on the selected backup type (backup or synchronization):
- A) for all backup types except the Synchronization (Update)
- B) for Synchronization (Update) type only
Case A. Here, you must select one or more destination folders to store your backups. The first folder is the main and the other folders are duplication. The order of the selected folders is important because a backup will be created in the first folder, and then it will be duplicated to second, third, etc., according to its order.
Below, you can specify the template of the backups naming.
Exiland Backup allows you to specify the template for the names of your backups so that the names of the created backups depend on the creation date and time.
The template may contain the following variables [YYYY], [DD], [MM], [hh], [mm], [ss], etc. All possible values are listed below.
Please select your template from the list, if needed.
Possible values:
| [YYYY] | - year 4 digits, for example, 2012 |
| [YY] | - year 2 digits, for example, 06 |
| [MM] | - month 2 digits, for example, 03 or 12 |
| [M] | - month 1 digit, for example, 3 or 12 |
| [DD] | - day 2 digits, for example, 09 or 24 |
| [D] | - day 1 digit, for example, 9 or 24 |
| [hh] | - hours 2 digits, for example, 08 or 19 |
| [h] | - hours 1 digit, for example, 8 or 19 |
| [mm] | - minutes 2 digits, for example, 02 or 23 |
| [m] | - minutes 1 digit, for example, 2 or 23 |
| [ss] | - seconds 2 digits, for example, 00 or 10 |
| [s] | - seconds 1 digit, for example, 0 or 10 |
| [month] | - name of month as text, for example, 'january' |
| [Month] | - name of month as text, for example, 'January' |
| [DayOfWeek] | - day of week as text, for example, 'Monday' |
| [dayOfWeek] | - day of week as text, for example, 'monday' |
Possible characters in the template:
- letters 'A'...'Z' and 'a'...'z'
- national characters
- digits 0...9
- characters ~ ! [ ] $ @ _ - ( )
IMPORTANT! It is recommended to specify the year, month, day, hour, and minutes. By default, this offers the most optimal template that guarantees unique backups names and provides the right order of the backups by name.
IMPORTANT! If you want have a fixed name of backup (not depend of date and time), press the "Without date and time" button or select the first item from the list. In this case you must set limit the number of FULL backups = 1. First backup copy will automatically deleted before creating the second copy. It is necessary to avoid conflict files name.
IMPORTANT! If you save backups to a NAS server, it is not recommended to specify a backup template with a too long name, because this may lead to the achievement of a maximum path length limit on your NAS server.
Delete old full backups automatically
Generally, there is no point in keeping very old backups because they take up a lot of disk space. You can set up rotation of full backups so that only the last backups always remain, and the oldesst are deleted.
If you set a limit by the number of backups, for example 10, then the oldest backups will be deleted before creating a new backup.
If you set a limit by the storage time, for example, to keep only for the last 3 months, then only those backups that were created within the last 3 months will be stored on disk, and all other backups will be deleted.
If you set a limit by the total size of backups, then this allows you to rationally use disk space for storing backups.
When to delete old backups - this setting allows you to choose the algorithm of the program according to your needs. Three values are available for you: "Before executing the job", "After executing the job" and "Detect automatically". If "Detect automatically" is selected, the program will check for free disk space to create a new backup. If there is enough disk space, a new backup will be created first, then the oldest one will be deleted. If there is not enough space, then the old one will be deleted first (to free up disk space), then a new backup will be created.
Case B - Synchronization (Update). You must specify the full path to the destination folder for synchronization. If the folder does not exist, it will be created before the first synchronization.
SYNCHRONIZATION RULES: Exiland Backup compares files in both the source folder and the destination folder. If new, modified, or deleted source files are found, they will be added/replaced/deleted to the destination folder.
Destination folder scan frequency. The program detects all changes in the source based on the data received when scanning the source folder. There is no need to scan the destination folder. However, at least sometimes, it is recommended to scan the destination folder too - this is necessary to fix the files in the destination folder, if suddenly someone manually deleted or corrupted files in it. Such files will be recopied from the source. Scanning the destination folder takes extra time and the job takes longer than usual. If you are sure that no one changes files in the destination folder, then there is no point in scanning it too often. In the synchronization rules, you can specify how often the destination folder should be scanned. For a rare scan, it is recommended to specify a value of 15-20.
Common settings for both cases A and B
Low disk space warning
This feature is very useful for controlling the free disk space on a disk. To use this feature, you need to specify the amount of megabytes and, by reducing it, the warning will show in the log if you have defined a notification for the job (Step 7) in case of errors/warnings.
For example, you can set it so that you receive an e-mail notification if the disk space is less than 100 megabytes.