Successful backup to external full hard drive

A fictitious assumption: A user has connected an external hard disk to his computer. He uses this hard disk exclusively for backing up his data. This is recommended, because on a backup hard drive should only be security copies - because everything else that would be on it, would then again not secured.

Today's hard disks have a lot of space. While in former times one spoke of kilobytes, today it is terabytes and tomorrow already zettabytes (that is already 10²¹ bytes). So you have enough space and the user can save a full backup on his external hard drive every time. This concept is good.

But what happens if the disk space is exhausted and there is no more memory for new backups? It would be desirable if the backup software would remove older full backups from the data medium as soon as there is no more space. This would automatically ensure that there is always enough space available on the backup hard disk. And despite all that several versions exist on the hard disk.

In Langmeier Backup there is this feature since several versions and with a little trick you address exactly this function: At the backup destination path, where you specify the folder in which the backup should take place, you simply manually insert a so-called variable. Let's say we take the date as the variable in each case. This then looks like this:

Backup destination path: D:\Backup from [dd.mm.yyyy]

To delete an older backup folder if there is not enough space left, there is the so-called FreeUp-Option for this variable. This must be lowercase and appended to the date with a space:

D:_Backup from [dd.mm.yyyy freeup]

This way, the backup program will create a separate folder for each backup pass and, if there is not enough space left on the hard disk, it will delete an older backup folder. It is ensured that at least one backup folder remains on the hard disk. However, if there is only one backup folder left on the hard disk and there is still not enough space, then the backup will abort with the error "Not enough space". For the reason that otherwise the last existing backup is lost.

With this little trick you can be sure that your data will always exist on this external hard drive, even if you perform a new backup.

Further lookup: external hard drive, Langmeier Backup, Data backup

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