Backing up data

erluck53

In the process of a backup that is taking an hour. Zotero recommends frequent backups. Is there a method to do incremental backups, or does copying the entire folder each time make more sense? Thanks.

aurimas

Incremental backups are certainly the way to go. Particularly for file attachments, the large majority of them don't change on daily basis. Even the SQLite database can be backed up incrementally.

In general, you should utilize some sort of software to perform these backups, which these days will almost always perform incremental backups.

erluck53

Any suggestion how to do an incremental backup manually?

aurimas

What OS? And why are you set on manual backups?

erluck53

Win 7. It's just easier for me to organize and backup that way in this case.

adamsmith

I don't think it's possible to manually do an incremental backup. I mean-what an incremental back-up does is to go through every file in the directory, compare it to the available back-up, if it's the same, create a link to to the old copy, if it's different, back it up. The beauty of back-up software is that it can automate what would otherwise be a pretty much impossibly burdensome task.
Unless by "manual" you don't mean not using back-up software, but just doing it with the click of a button. That should be included in most back-up software, I thought including the one that comes with Windows 7.

erluck53

It's ok. As the documentation says, it's wise to copy the entire folder to another destination, and that is what I will do. I was hoping that updating by copying certain files within the folder would suffice.

aurimas

I would (given these constraints) make a more frequent backup of the zotero.sqlite file and make backups of the "storage" directory less frequently. zotero.sqlite contains all of the metadata. "storage" directory contains all of the file attachments. As I mentioned above, one tends to be updated more frequently than the other.