Cobian Reflector • Thoughts about a few Settings (Temporary Folder, Differential copies to keep)

1. The "Temporary Folder" setting should be task specific or override a global setting. If you have more than one drive from which you want to back up data, it is very likely that you would like to use more than one fixed temporary folder. Either you want the source and the temporary folder on different drives to reduce unnecessary head movement of an HDD, or you want them on the same drive so that in the end the temporary file can be easily moved to the destination instead of having to copy/delete it. Or in my specific case, I would like to use an SSD as a temporary folder for all small daily tasks, but I would rather use a conventional hard drive (or perhaps no temporary folder at all) for my 100+ GB photo collection (to go easy on the SSD).
2. The setting "Differential copies to keep" (=K) is unnecessary for "Differential backups". According to my understanding, K means the differential copies for each full copy. Therefore it makes no sense to set K smaller or larger than "Make a full backup every" (=F). Smaller (K < F) would mean that a full backup would never be made and larger (K > F) values than F would be ignored because the counter is reset with each full backup. So it only makes sense to always set K equal to F. In my opinion it would be more useful if we could use K to limit the absolute number of differential backups. You could easily build a multi level backup by keeping full backups longer than differential backups (e.g. ddF ddF F F F)... and if you simply set K = F * "Full copies to keep" you have the old system.

Statistics: Posted by Sascha — 07 Mar 2024, 16:21 — Replies 1 — Views 36