I'm only investing the effort to create an account here because I genuinely like the clean open source approach by the developer. However, I don't think Cobian will suit my use case with its current feature set.
I used to backup several Google Drive folders (completely mirrored to local directories) to two external HDDs with FreeFileSync in the past. I decided against Cobian back then because there was no git-like "Diff Tool" that listed all changes that would occur compared to the last full backup. However, I still managed to unknowingly delete files on my backup HDDs because FreeFileSync's integrated Diff View becomes pretty damn confusing once several hundred files change.
So, is there any way in Cobian Backup / Reflector to see exactly what files and folders will be removed at least? Generally, I would HIGHLY recommend a Diff View (or at least an integration for an external Diff Tool) as a future feature for Cobian Reflector. The way it is now I always have to use a Diff Tool such as Diffinity to compare the previous and the current full backup with each other to make sure I don't accidentally delete files in my backups. And obviously, this becomes extremely annoying if I have to do this each damn time.
I guess it shouldn't be that much of an effort to allow for the comparison of two files from the history pane within Cobian Reflector. It would just be another context menu entry that enables once two entries have been selected, and that (upon a click) passes down the paths to each backup directory to a parameterized command line call with configurable variables for the left and the right folder. For Diffinity a folder compare can be carried out on the commandline by just passing the paths + "-folderdiff" as arguments:
https://truehumandesign.se/diffinityDocumentation.php
It's just a matter of allowing the user to set custom parameters on the command line on some settings page in the preferences (like how Visual Studio supports external Diff Tools).
Obviously this is more tricky if you store the backups compressed, as uncompressing in advance takes time and storage. So you probably need to limit this behaviour to only uncompressed backups. Supporting compressed archives is likely more difficult and might require a custom implementation that's able to compare the compressed archive paths.
EDIT: Apparently Cobian Reflector isn't open source, which is a bit of a letdown. However, this still doesn't change the fact it's entirely free of any corporate clutter such as ads or enforced registrations.
I used to backup several Google Drive folders (completely mirrored to local directories) to two external HDDs with FreeFileSync in the past. I decided against Cobian back then because there was no git-like "Diff Tool" that listed all changes that would occur compared to the last full backup. However, I still managed to unknowingly delete files on my backup HDDs because FreeFileSync's integrated Diff View becomes pretty damn confusing once several hundred files change.
So, is there any way in Cobian Backup / Reflector to see exactly what files and folders will be removed at least? Generally, I would HIGHLY recommend a Diff View (or at least an integration for an external Diff Tool) as a future feature for Cobian Reflector. The way it is now I always have to use a Diff Tool such as Diffinity to compare the previous and the current full backup with each other to make sure I don't accidentally delete files in my backups. And obviously, this becomes extremely annoying if I have to do this each damn time.
I guess it shouldn't be that much of an effort to allow for the comparison of two files from the history pane within Cobian Reflector. It would just be another context menu entry that enables once two entries have been selected, and that (upon a click) passes down the paths to each backup directory to a parameterized command line call with configurable variables for the left and the right folder. For Diffinity a folder compare can be carried out on the commandline by just passing the paths + "-folderdiff" as arguments:
https://truehumandesign.se/diffinityDocumentation.php
It's just a matter of allowing the user to set custom parameters on the command line on some settings page in the preferences (like how Visual Studio supports external Diff Tools).
Obviously this is more tricky if you store the backups compressed, as uncompressing in advance takes time and storage. So you probably need to limit this behaviour to only uncompressed backups. Supporting compressed archives is likely more difficult and might require a custom implementation that's able to compare the compressed archive paths.
EDIT: Apparently Cobian Reflector isn't open source, which is a bit of a letdown. However, this still doesn't change the fact it's entirely free of any corporate clutter such as ads or enforced registrations.
Statistics: Posted by ghostryder333 — 08 Jan 2023, 09:16