DoubleSafety - Online help

DoubleSafety supports three backup types – Full, Update and Incremental.

Full backup means that the selected files are completely backed up each time.

If you update an existing archive, the previous archive opens and new files are added to it; files that have been modified are updated. If you use the mode of storing several backup versions, the previous archive is copied to a new location and then updated. Note that even if some file has been erased from the hard drive, it will remain in the archive even after an update anyway.

Incremental backup means that not all selected files are backed up, but only those that have been modified since the last backup of this item. It allows you to considerably increase the backup speed. To recover data, you will have to recover the full archive first and then all incremental archives after that. That is why we recommend that you make full backup from time to time.

In case of incremental backup, DoubleSafety uses the Archive attribute to detect that the file has been modified. Once a file is created or modified, the system sets the Archive attribute for it. The Archive attribute is cleared only after the archive is successfully created.

You can store several backup versions in the destination folder. To do it, select the "Store backup versions in subfolders using timestamps" checkbox and specify additional parameters. Archives will be created in subfolders.

Timestamp format

Specify the format of the subfolders archives will be saved to. The format must contain macros. Each time data is backed up, each macro will be replaced with its value, for example, date and time depending on the selected macro.

Deleting old versions

You can configure old archives to be deleted automatically. It can be useful if you want to store, for example, only 4 backup copies, but to back up your data every day.

Old files are deleted only after a new archive is successfully created so you can rest assured that it will not happen that you have no backup copies.

It is impossible to delete archives automatically in case of incremental backup because all archives created during incremental backup are needed to restore data. The feature is also unavailable when you write data to a disk.