I would like to backup my Win 11 data files to my Android S26. I know that I should be able to sync, but not really wanting sync. I would like to have the files on PC copied to phone and if i later copy or change a file on my PC I would like that file to copy to the phone. Also, if I delete a file on my PC I do not want it deleted from the phone.

Does Syncthing have the ability to do as described, if not do you have a suggestion?

Thank you!

I have a computer with two mechanical hard drives. One is the C system drive and one is just a file drive. Well the data drive got full so data started getting saved onto the system drive instead of backing everything up like I told the person to do.

Well last week the computer wouldn't start after a power outage. Every time I turned it on the computer wouldn't boot into Windows. It didn't see the install and kept saying no boot drive detected. I was able to boot into it in comand prompt with a USB drive and noticed the user directory was gone and there was just the public directory. At this point turned the computer off so I can make a backup of the drive to a working drive.

If I connect the drive to another working WIndows PC the drive will show up in Windows Explorer but it just shows the drive letter. It doesn't show the total space and free space like normal. If I try to look at the drive manager in Windows nothing shows up because it just hangs trying to load the drives to display. In the past this has been because of a bad drive is connected.

There are no obvious noises like clicking or grinding so I am hoping that it's just some index files getting bessed up and the underlining files are still there.

My question is what's the best free option for making a raw backup of the dying drive?

I don't normally do this stuff. I'm just trying to help someone that's freaking out that all of their data from the past year could be gone.

I'm thinking I can make a raw copy of the drive to a good working drive. Then I can go about trying my best to get the data off the working drive that this person needs. We have no money to spend but I do have a stack of working hard drives and SSDs.

Hi everyone,

I’m currently building NotionManager, a local-first desktop app designed to snapshot Notion workspaces into a block-based local DB for high-fidelity offline viewing.

While full snapshotting works beautifully, I’ve spent weeks trying to implement an incremental backup feature to save users from re-downloading gigabytes of data. After digging deep into the implementation, I’ve hit a wall that isn’t just about rate limits—it’s about fundamental API design flaws.

Here is the engineering reality. I’ve come to the conclusion that a truly reliable incremental backup tool cannot be built on top of the current Notion API. Change my mind.

Here is the breakdown of why it breaks down:

1. The LACK of a Traversal Endpoint

Notion provides no native way to traverse or stream the workspace graph from the root. You cannot ask for a changelog or a delta stream.

2. The Broken last_edited_time Behavior

Every object has a last_edited_time, which sounds promising, but its behavior makes it useless for mutation detection:

• Minute-level Resolution: The timestamp resolution is capped at the minute level. For rapid programmatic changes or busy workspaces, this granularity is blind to rapid successive mutations.
• No Topology Bubble-up: Updating a child block or a sub-page does not bubble up and update the last_edited_time of the parent page. The parent remains frozen in time. Worse, this behavior is completely undocumented and requires constant trial-and-error to map out.

3. The Entrance Problem (No Global Catalog)

Objects do maintain parent topology information, which is great, but you still need a global entry point to start recursing down.

4. The Hack: Forcing /v1/search into a Global Router

The only global entry point available is the /v1/search endpoint. It guarantees that any object explicitly shared with the integration will show up. This works as a baseline for full backups, allowing us to maintain a global flat list of entry points (pages and databases).

5. Why Incremental Discovery is an Illusion

For incremental backups, you must discover newly created objects. Currently, there is no reliable mechanism for this. With precise tuning, /v1/search seems to surfaced new objects eventually. But here is the catch: it offers zero API contract guarantees. Search indexes can be delayed, rate-limited, or completely omit items without violating the endpoint’s design contract (since it’s meant for humans searching keywords, not machines syncing state).

The Bitter Conclusion

If we blindly trust that the /v1/search index behavior remains consistent, we can hypothetically discover new objects, combine them with our previous global list, and check individual last_edited_time stamps to build a "near-usable" sync.

Unfortunately, "near-usable" is completely unacceptable for a backup solution.

Because the search API offers no contractual guarantees, the sync engine could quietly miss a newly created sub-page, fail silently, and cause catastrophic data loss without the user or the app ever knowing.

Therefore, my architectural conclusion is absolute: Under the current API design, a reliable incremental backup for Notion is impossible. You either pull the entire world every time via full snapshots, or you accept silent corruption.

To anyone who has wrestled with Notion's data model or built sync engines on top of legacy web APIs: Am I missing a hidden workaround, or have you all forced your users into mandatory full snapshots as well?

Would love to hear your thoughts or architectural post-mortems on this!

I've tried a few of the more popular software our there like handbreak, makemv, VLC and they either just say can not backup, don't let me or just take the one larger file on to disk and convert it to some other format. That has the same problem if I copy over the file myself, its all on long video, might not even have all the videos anyways, it doesn't play right and what not.

All I want is a way to easily backup the Sony disks so each shorter video is its own separate file you can rename and what not. I don't want to have to screen record it to capture because I'm not waisting 50+ hours or however many hours it is to do this. I'd also prefer not to have to ship it somewhere if I don't have to. The videos play fine on the Mac its backing them up that's the problem.

Like a lot of people here I back up my Proton Drive from a headless Linux server (restic, nightly) to whatever, Synology, pCloud, you name it.

The usual route is rclone's protondrive backend, and like others here I watched it get slower and slower until a flat folder with 785 photos took 160 seconds to list on a good day and never finished on a bad one. Six-hour hangs, dead mount points. The throttling is pattern-based: rclone walks the whole tree with thousands of metadata calls every night, and Proton's API understandably stops picking up. The part that surprised me: the official Drive SDK (github.com/ProtonDriveApps/sdk, MIT) is already good enough to fix this yourself. I built a small read-only gateway with it:

- metadata lives in a local SQLite cache, kept fresh through the SDK's event stream (the same mechanism the official apps use, polled once a minute)

- the tree is exposed as WebDAV on localhost, so restic reads it through a boring rclone webdav mount

- file contents are never stored, just streamed on demand, decrypted and integrity-verified by the SDK

Results on the same account that was being throttled: that 785-file folder lists in 0.106 seconds. First full snapshot (3,069 files, 42 GiB) took 22 minutes.

The nightly incremental run now takes 0.82 seconds and makes zero calls to Proton unless something actually changed. Restore came back bit-for-bit identical. It follows the SDK rules: identifies as external-drive-*, event-based, no recursive scans, personal use only (which the license explicitly allows). It can't write anything, so the worst it can do to your Drive is read it well 😊

Two things I ran into that might interest the Proton devs if they're reading: the incubating account package isn't on npm yet (vendoring works fine), and getSeekableStream() deadlocks under parallel load (32 of 70 concurrent ranged reads hung, reproducible; the regular download path is rock solid). Happy to file a proper issue with details.

Full write-up with all source code (free to reuse for personal setups): Medium (free) article

Not affiliated with Proton, just a subscriber who wanted his 3 a.m. backups back, and if the native Linux client lands before you build this, even better. That's the outcome I'm actually rooting for.

Set up automated DB backups to S3 months ago and just... never checked again. Cron runs, script does its thing, assume it's fine.

Then I realized I'd have zero idea if it silently broke. Bucket permission change, script error, cron just dying — I wouldn't find out until the day I actually needed a backup and it wasn't there.

Anyone actually monitor this or just trust it? Has this bitten anyone before?

A few days ago I accidentally ran a scam that made me input my password into my Macbook’s terminal. I’ve been feeling awful about it and very stupid as I have NEVER fallen for these kinds of things before!!!

Anyway damage was done and a whole bunch of my accounts were hacked, I did change the passwords to everything and logged out of everything everywhere already, but i’m planning on factory resetting the Macbook to be safe.

I was wondering if anyone knew how to best preserve important documents before the factory reset goes through? I have an important iMovie video i’m in the process of editing and I do not want to lose all my progress. Is there any way to save it and reopen it at a later time?

I’ve also read that I should keep my Mac disconnected from wifi as long as possible to keep everything safe but i’m unsure how to save my documents without syncing anything to my iCloud etc. Any advice on what to do!!! I’m really freaking out and I don’t want anything to be compromised again!!!

Sorry for these dumb questions, I'm fairly new to my videography pursuit and working with some local musicians and editing on FCP. I have a LaCie 2 tb thats running out of space and I'm learning that I should have backed it up. How do I back up my hard drive to keep a mirror for safety?

And! I've read good things about the samsung t7/ shield but also saw lots of people say it would disconnect on them often. Looking for advice on a good external hard drive to buy to use as my new main go-to: I'm broke rn so the cheaper the better but if I have to drop money on it I will. I film on Hi-8 VHS tapes and record them on OBS, so I'm often dealing with some pretty big video files (8 gb +) when I move them from OBS to SSD to FCP but other than that nothing too massive.

Hello, we have been using BackupExec for a long time since despite all its flaws, it worked for us. Sadly we are forced to replace it because the product is essentially dead now.

We actually have very basic needs, but some policies add extra needs that arent covered by most software. This is what we need:

• File/File Share backup, both local and on remote servers, with Full and Incremental options
• Database backups (not a dealbreaker, since we use Exports for some)
• Password based encryption
• Reports that show what files were backed in the job(this one of those extra needs I meant)
• A filter for files modified by date or from certain dates. We need to back info into rotating tapes daily, and we try to cover between the10-30 days of recent changes of certain shares because of their size. The whole share is frozen monthly in a different tape.
• Cant be a free software(another of those extra needs)

We tried VEEAM, Nakivo and AOMEI BackUpper, and while they cover most of our needs, none offered an option to filter by date(at least I couldnt find any) and the reports offered dont cover our needs.

Any suggestions are welcome

--EDIT

To give context on what we need, we have 2 Files Shares of 1TB each, among other loose files we need to backup into RDX Tapes, that must be sent offsite daily. The loose files arent a problem, since they are managed daily by freezing them in a monthly RDX.

The problem comes from the 1TB Shares, that cant be backed fully because of size and time constraints. We only do a full backup(freeze) of these once a month, parallel of the daily backups we do. These daily backups take the files that has been modified in the last 30 days. The idea is that if weed to mount back a Share, we restore the last monthly freeze, and then the last daily backup so the new server is up to date.

Reason I asked for incremental option is because we have another that share doesnt need to be frozen, nor go offsite. We only need to keep 1 week which is why we do a fullbackup on weekends, then incremental the rest of the weeks. If the weekend backup fail, we can still run it next day without penalty, unlike the daily backups that must go offsite.

Overall, the daily backup is quite small, around 100 GB after compression with BackupExec, mostly coming from the loose files, with share info is probably less than 10 GB daily.

Title pretty much says it all. I have a 256GB iPhone and my 200GB iCloud plan is maxed out. My library holds memories dating back to 2012, so deleting everything isn't an option, though I’ve already cleared out all the clutter and junk videos.
Is upgrading to the next iCloud tier the only seamless way forward, or is there a reliable, preferably free/cheap way to back up years of media outside of Apple's ecosystem? What's your current setup?

Quiero saber como puedo liberar una computadora con Sistema operativo Windows 11, ya que tengo una computadora de trabajo que tiene una cuenta corporativa que es mía, pero como tal quiero liberarla ya que esta registrada en un software del corporativo en el cual cada vez nos limitan bastante ya que hasta tenemos algunos puertos bloqueados físicamente para la introducción de algún disco duro, pero solo nos dejan uno disponible, mas que nada para poder trabajar mas agusto y mejor, y quiero respaldar todo excepto la cuenta corporativa, quiero agregar una personal

So I'm working with a US based customer. It's a banking project.

They're having strict compliance requirements on data security and disaster recovery. So as per the compliance they're not fully trusting Azure and asked for an offline backup solution which can work along with what we're already doing using Azure Backup.

Our main workload is Few Windows based VMs, File Servers and SQL Databases.

Do we have any 3rd Party providers within the US who provide an offsite backup replica storage and can establish a connection to Azure in order to transfer backups to offsite?

The solution can be scripted, only question is about good trustable vendors.

Compliance retention criteria: Minimum 7 Years.

[OC]

Update: the Customer does not have any onprem facility as of now. It's an Integration with a Banking ecosystem. Not itself a banking.

I kind of regret my decision to get into all this. I used AI to help me move all my external HDD into one Linux PC and setup mergerfs and snapraid. In the process I somehow lost 7TB of data tried to recover it but all i could get was individual files with jumbled up names and I'm not going through all that so I just set it up fresh. Now AI is telling me doing a simple folder mirror doesn't work well with Windows to Linux because file time can get off slightly and remove files that shouldn't be removed. I just want to mirror a folder from Windows to Linux NAS with a simple interface. I thought FreeFileSync would work well but on my first run it showed 43 files to delete from the NAS saying they don't exist on my Windows PC but if I click the file it says is missing it's right there in the folder. It worked so well when I just had external drives hooked up and I could mirror folders, now I just feel like I'm in over my head.

Has anyone found a practical way to automate the offline copy in a 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy?

We’ve been building a service that encrypts backups onto USB drives and mails them to customers because we found most people never actually maintain an offline copy. Right now it supports Dropbox and websites over SSH.

I’m mainly looking for feedback: is this solving a real problem, or would you rather handle offline backups yourself? What sources would you want supported?

A month or 2 ago iDrive had a bug that caused it to be running in the background and actually working and using say 10% of resources. It is doing it again. Is this being seen by others and has idrive said "oops" again and have a fix on the way?

Any hdd recommendations? Looking for one that is able to last long

Hi, AppHookup!

I’m the developer of Watermelon Backup.

iPhone Photos take up most of the storage for me. I do have an iCloud plan, but after a few heart-stopping moments, I decided not to enable iCloud Photos and to manage my photos myself.

I had a Synology DS216play for years, and setting it up was not too difficult for me. But over time, the poor hardware became more and more slower.

Last 2 years, I bought a new device and started using unRAID to store all my photos and videos, and use a more powerful Mac mini to drive Immich and manage unRAID photo folder via External Library feature. Immich mobile is great, but it cannot backup photos directly to unRAID.

So I needed an app that could backup the photos from my iPhone while keeping the original files and metadata, without reducing image quality or removing EXIF data. Ideally, it should support background backups, not be tied to a specific brand or cloud service, perform well, and preferably be open source.

Eventually, I realized I probably needed to build the app myself. That’s how Watermelon Backup started.

---

Compared with other similar apps, Watermelon Backup tries to offer all of these things together:

1. The code is open source, which I hope can reduce some concerns about the privacy of your photos and videos.
2. It supports multiple storage nodes. A node can be an external drive, SMB share, WebDAV server, S3-compatible bucket, or SFTP server.
3. Carefully design and implement in code, not a toy project.
4. No Subscriptions.

---

Version 1.5.0 is a big update for Watermelon Backup, and it also has a new website:

https://watermelonbackup.com/

I spent about six full weeks working on the update and the website. The “design → code → test” loop went on and on, and honestly, I’m a little exhausted now. I would really like to get more feedback from users.

So the in-app purchase free for a limited time.

I am waiting for your all feedback, no matter good or not good.

App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6762260596

I am currently trying to do a backup of my hardrive so that I can install Linux on it. I used BelenaEtcher to get Recscuezilla on my USB-stick. Windows said that I need to format USB-Laufwerk (E:) and USB-Laufwerk (F:) but the guy in the video said that I shouldn't my USB-Stick so I ignored it.

When I boot into the boot menu with F2 my USB is listed as second place as USB HDD: USB. Pressing enter does nothing. What should I do?