Gerry Heidenreich

Long story short: Shortcuts to Windows' briefcases have the 'Update All' option in their context menu.

Long story: I'm on a number of machines throughout my day (home, work, dev, various servers), and as I've mentioned before, I live & die by what's on my USB drive.  After a recent scare I decided to find a better way to sync the stuff on my USB drive where it's needed... I've always kept arbitrary dumps (currently ~800mb each) as backups, whenever I think of it, which is actually kind of stupid of me... I've played with XP's sync toy, and I've scheduled Windows jobs to copy periodically, but I want more:

What I want:
* Quick, differential backups of just the changes since last time
* Backup solution managed from my USB drive
* 'In my face' reminder to backup my data
* Work-related material backed up on my work machines
* Personal material backed up on my home network
* R&D backed up on my dev boxes.

I found a simple answer in the Windows' Briefcase tool.

Briefcase
The Briefcase tool is pretty easy.  Simply create a new briefcase object in your backup location, and drag & drop your folder to be backed up onto the briefcase.  To update, simply right-click the briefcase & select Update All from the context menu.

The problem at this point (and the reason I never used it) is that to update, you need to find your briefacase (in your backup location) and manually click update all from there, which isn't realistic; this problem stems from the fact that I forget to backup if it's not in my face reminding me.  What would really be nice is if there was a briefcase in the folder I'm currently working in, on the USB drive.

Problem:
I want to backup my E:\Work folder on my USB Drive to my C:\USB Drive Work folder on my workstation.

Solution:
In the image on the left you can see my USB Drive's 'Work' folder, where I like to keep my current work projects.  I have created a folder on my workstation's C: drive called USB Drive Work, and placed a briefcase inside of it.  I dragged the USB Work folder onto it to create the sync.  I then Right-click dragged the briefcase back onto the USB Drive's 'Work' folder, and selected Create Shortcut.  As you can see, right-clicking on the shortcut to the briefcase shows Update All in the context menu.  Clicking Update All now will sync the new shortcut you created.

Now it's in my face, and I'm backing up just what I want, to where it belongs.

Restoring:
Restoring is as easy as dragging & dropping the Work item from the briefcase back into the appropriate folder on the USB drive.

Still problems:
There's no perfect solution; this introduces other problems, like a dependency on which machine I'm on when I decide to backup.  If I try to backup work stuff from home, I'll get a missing shortcut error.  No big deal really, I'm not likely to be doing such a thing, and if I am, I'll make another shortcut and specify the backup location (i.e. a work one, and a home one).