Reliable Backup & Restore Options?

[noblemaster]

Based on what I have read, Syncovery is a great & reliable tool for backup. Unfortunately, there are too many options which are not that clear on how exactly they work.

Basically what I want is the following:
- Incremental Backups that can be restored for a date/time of my choosing
- Encrypted Backups (this one is easy to select)

Questions:
1. Do I have to backup the profiles in order to restore?
2. Do they profiles contain the encryption password for encrypted backups (when I export a profile)? I am planning to save the profiles on an external sever together with the backups so I can easily restore as needed. However, if the profile contains the encryption password, I should probably encrypt it beforehand as otherwise someone else would be able to restore my backup as well.
3a. For "Synthetic Backup": how are deleted files handled? If I delete a file in a later backup, will I still be able to restore the file in an earlier backup or will it be gone there also. Does that depend on the sync operation mode such as "Standard Copying" or "Exact Mirror"?
3b. What options do I have to select to restore for a date & time. If a file was deleted for that date/time, I don't want it to appear in the restore. However, I still want to be able to restore a file for e.g. an earlier date/time if that file still existed there. Do I chose "Synthetic Backup" & "Exact Mirror"? Do I chose "Synthetic Backup" & "Standard Copying"? Do I need to select anything else? Is that not possible?

I guess my confusion mostly comes from "Standard Copying" vs. "Exact Mirror". While mirroring implies deleted files are gone forever (and cannot be restored), standard copying implies I am unable to delete files from the backup (and files will always be restored even though they were deleted at one point in time).

[superflexible]

Hello,
you only need to change very few settings from the defaults and keep all others.

You do not need the original profile for a restore - but you do need to know the Encryption password.

If you export profiles, the password will only be exported when you choose the ".ini" format. xml and csv do not contain passwords. But you could just make a copy of the complete Syncovery.ini file from C:\ProgramData\Syncovery. That's better than exporting.

To have files be deleted on the backup storage, you need to choose Exact Mirror. If you don't want deletions, keep Standard Copying. You should specify a folder for deleted files on the tab sheet Files->Deletions. For example, /Deleted Files. To restore files from there, you'd need to download them manually or set up a restore profile that uses the Deleted Files folder as source path.

The Restore Wizard allows you to specify a target date for the restore. However, it does not know when a file was deleted. This feature is unforunately not available. You need to restore/choose deleted files manually.

[kuehni1]

I want to emphasis, that more transparency / documentation is needed about syncovery's backup approaches. I searched a lot in the forum and in the documentation until I found a description of Syncovery's unexpected backup strategy incl. a solution.

My setting was also "exact mirror" and "incremental backup", believing, that each checkpoint mirrors the folder(s) exactly at the time of profile execution. I thought, deleted files can be found at older checkpoints, because I assumed, that this setting establishes a kind of "rolling" backup, which gives you a set of backups rolling from e.g. daily -> weekly -> monthly backups to backups per year.

In any case, I expected to find all my "backuped" files in the backup. However, I was completely wrong and I lost some errorenous deleted files because they were removed from my backup too. In my view, "exact mirror" and "backup" are excluding each others, a deletion of unique files from the backup should never be an element of a true backup approach.

[Shaipetit]

I’ll use this thread to ask for a related question.

Is it possible to make left to right exact mirror incremental backups using Syncovery?

For instance, the initial Syncovery full backup on Sunday consists of data A, B.

On Monday data C was created.
Therefore, Syncovery Monday’s incremental backup should only include data C.

On Tuesday data D was created and data C was deleted.
Therefore, Tuesday’s backup should only include data D and Syncovery should make a note for itself that data C was deleted, but Syncovery shouldn’t physically delete unique data C located in Monday’s incremental backup. If Tuesday’s backup is restored, Syncovery should restore data A, B, D (without C), i.e. exact mirror of Tuesday.

However, if Monday’s backup is restored, Syncovery should still be able to restore data A, B, C (even if data C was deleted on Tuesday), i.e. exact mirror of Monday.

Is it possible? What Syncovery settings should be used?

Thank you.

[superflexible]

Hello,
this is not possible. You have to keep in mind that Syncovery is mainly a file synchronization program. It will mirror your data to another storage. If files have been deleted, it can either keep them or delete them or move them to a separate folder for deleted files.

However I do want to extend Syncovery's capabilities based on the concepts mentioned in this thread. The last few years development efforts have gone mainly into supporting various cloud storage APIs, and optimizing speed, providing a Linux version, and adding and fixing many little things. The basic functionality of versioning and other things has not been touched in a longer while. I hope I can work on that next year.

[Shaipetit]

Obviously Syncovery's foundation is based on Super Flexible File Synchronizer. However, with extensive support for online storage Syncovery is a very attractive solution for some serious backing up too.

Implementation of archive type deduplicating rolling incremental forever style backup would definitely position Syncovery not only as serious synchronizer as it is now, but also as a sophisticated backup solution.

Some interesting open source backup projects to get some ideas at:

https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io

https://duplicacy.com