As much as I dislike the whole Caff\u00e8 Latte sipping, ribid fanboy culture around Apple, I can’t help but be jealous of some of the cool features that Apple has in their computers.<\/p>\n
Time Machine<\/a> is ultra cool. Being able to go back in time to an eariler version of a document is extremly useful to have. Unless you have a Windows 2003 server at home, the Shadow Copy<\/a> service is not available to you. <\/p>\n With one great little open source program called Unison<\/a> however, you can mimic this great backup feature on your Windows XP system.<\/p>\n Here’s how you do it:<\/p>\n 1. Get the Unison Windows text binary from this site<\/a>. The version that I used was unison-2.10.2d-win-text.exe. You should rename the file to Unison.exe instead.<\/p>\n 2. Find a place to backup your data. Either a local folder, another computer’s shared folder or a NAS like FreeNAS will do. For example: \\\\server\\backupstore.<\/p>\n 3. Create a path on the backup location that will store the backup files. You should have a sub folder for the folder that you intend to backup. If you are backing up ‘My Documents’ for example: \\\\server\\backupstore\\backups\\my documents.<\/p>\n 4. Create a folder where the pervious file versions will be stored. For example: \\\\server\\backupstore\\backups\\oldversions.<\/p>\n 5. Run Unison once to create the c:\\Documents and Settings\\username\\.unison folder.<\/p>\n 6. Create a backup.prf file with the following information in the c:\\Documents and Settings\\username\\.unison folder: <\/p>\n # Unison preferences file<\/p>\n #Source and destination root paths. # Helps out a lot on Windows # Don’t synchronize permission bits # Place new files at the top of the list #Backup everything and keep up to 5 old versions of a file in the oldversions folder. #Force non conflicting updates to go through and ask no questions. 7. Create a batch file called unisonbackup.bat with the following line: 8. Make a scheduled task to run the batch file once day or every few hours depending how often you want to check for file changes. <\/p>\n When the script is executed, all the files from the source root will be synched with data from the backup root location. If a file is changed, the old file will backed up to the old version folder. It’s not as fancy as Apple’s Time Machine feature but it will at least provide a way to go back in time to retrive old copies of a file that you need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As much as I dislike the whole Caff\u00e8 Latte sipping, ribid fanboy culture around Apple, I can’t help but be jealous of some of the cool features that Apple has in their computers. Time Machine is ultra cool. Being able … Continue reading
\nroot = c:\\documents and settings\\username\\my documents
\nroot = \\\\server\\backupstore\\backups\\my documents<\/p>\n
\nfastcheck = true<\/p>\n
\nperms = 0<\/p>\n
\nsortnewfirst = true<\/p>\n
\nbackup = Name *
\nmaxbackups = 5
\nbackuplocation = central
\nbackupdir = \\\\server\\backupstore\\backups\\oldversions<\/p>\n
\nbatch = true
\nauto = true
\n<\/i><\/p>\n
\nc:\\path to unison\\unison backup.prf. <\/p>\n