Making sure I have a basic backup set up correctly (backup type settings)

[Jasong222]

Hello everyone,

Just signed up, I discovered Cobian a while ago but only started using it recently, when I started taking backups more seriously. My main question for this post is if I have my backup set up correctly. I did search the forum and didn't see my specific questions. I also read the manual, but... I think I can tell what would happen, but I'm looking for explicit confirmation that I have things set up correctly.

Setup: I have 3 or 4 different drives that I'm backing up to one big external. So, like a 2T, a couple 4Ts and a 5T, which are not completely full, backing up to one 14T external USB drive.

Method: For the moment I'm setting up each drive as a separate task. Because each one goes to it's own special folder, and I'll probably back them up on different schedules. Movies goes to a 'Backup - Movies' folder, Documents goes to 'Backup - Documents' folder, etc.

Desired outcome: I want one backup that exactly matches the drive it's copied from. I don't want versions, or histories or anything like that. If I move a file in 'documents', I want that file to move in the backup also (deleted and recreated, I'm sure). If I change a file in the original, I want that file to copy and replace the previous version of that file in the backup.

Question 1: Are these settings correct to achieve the above?:

Backup is set to differential - (I did notice it automatically changed to 'full' for the first time running the backup. That's perfect).
"Create separated backup using timestamps" is UNCHECKED
"Use file attribute logic" is CHECKED
"Mirror Task" is CHECKED <---(I just now saw this setting. This function was the main reason for writing this post out. Now that I see it, I'm much more sure that I have everything set correctly. But, since everything is already written out, I'll just leave it for posterity.)

A couple settings that I don't quite understand:
"Always create top parent directory" (Currently CHECKED)
"Use absolute paths" (Currently UNCHECKED)

Anyway, so is those the settings I need to make the backup that I want?

Again, I'm not interested in being able to retrieve absolutely everything. I just want a "In case my hard drive crashes I have a backup, backup." Which has happened now twice to some files that.... It's not the end of the world to lose them but I put a lot of work into getting them and it sucks to lose them. 'Lol'.

[cobian]

Yes, that configuration seems right. You could also check if the user running the task has writing permissions to the "Safe mirror directory" as configured on the Settings-Advanced tab.

"Always create top parent directory" (Currently CHECKED)

This will create an "extra" directory on the destination. For example, if you copy c:\dir1 to d:\dir1 the resulting files will be copied to d:\dir1\di1

"Use absolute paths" (Currently UNCHECKED)

This will create the whole source directory tree on the destination. For example, if you copy c:\dir1 to d:\dir1 the resulting files will be copied to d:\dir1\c\dir1 \

[Jasong222]

Ok, so:

Thanks for the reply! Glad to know I have it set up correctly. I can test it with a test file here and there but I don't want to spend a lot of time with it. I'm really hoping to get it to 'set and forget' quickly. And with this structure it's hard to directly compare number of files, number of bytes, etc.

As to "Always create top parent" and "Use absolute paths" = thank you, also. I think I got it. I have another question around that, but I'll put that in a different thread. And later, because I'm good for now. Thanks!