Stop Backup and Syncing on battery

cormie · 30-11-2018 10:58AM #1

Hey folks,
I have Google's "Backup and Sync" and Crashplan both on my laptop. Both seem to be backing up very frequently, especially Google Backup and Sync since I started getting it to backup the App Data/Roamiing folder which has my email client Thunderbird in it, so I guess any time I get a new mail the files change, which would be a lot!

That's in itself another question I posted on the Thunderbird Forums here:

Hey, I just started syncing the App Data > Roaming > Thunderbird folder on Google Backup and Sync, and it seems every time I have Thunderbird open, Backup and Sync is constantly updating the files and removing the older files. The problem is, a lot of the files are big and it takes ages. Also the constant pop ups that the files are being moved to the bin are becoming a bit of a nuisance.

I also use CrashPlan to back up the entire computer, and this just works away in the background and from what I recall, it has a different way of dealing with the files that are frequently changed (say the inbox file when I get a new mail for example).

I'd still like Backup and Sync to back Thunderbird up as I want more than just the CrashPlan backup, juuust incase.

Is there any other solutions for this that won't have these issues?

Any feedback would be great!

Anyway, I was just wondering, is there any way to automatically pause the backup process of either Backup and Sync or Crashplan?

Any feedback would be great

EDIT: Ok, I found an option in Crasplan where it stops the backup processes when the battery reaches X percentage. I just put it to 99% and it seems to have worked

With Google, seems there's no similar option, although you can do it manually, this would mean having to remember all the time.

So perhaps there's a way to tell Windows to do it, or even better, would be a solution to the quoted text above and maybe have some other way of backing up the Thunderbird folder that means it's not happening constantly when it's in use.

30-11-2018 01:47PM

Alternative approach: don't add your Thunderbird folder to Crashplan/Google Backup. Instead run a scheduled task that will copy your Thunderbird folder to a new location, and back that up instead. That way it will only sync to the cloud as often as the scheduled task runs (could be weekly, daily, or hourly, depending on your requirements). The downside is that you'll need twice the space on your local machine.

cormie · 30-11-2018 03:46PM

Thanks a lot for the suggestion! I think that might be a good option alright! I wouldn't have a clue where to start with setting something like that up though

Say if I did that though, and if my Thunderbird folder is 15gb say, would the new location always be the same size as the Thunderbird folder, so it would replace, rather than just adding an extra 15GB folder each time?

I actually use IMAP via GMAIL for all my accounts, so I wouldn't need such frequent backups, once a day would be more than enough, but it might also be handy to have an older backup too, as it's happened to me before where there's been a problem and I didn't notice it for a few days and I would have liked to have been able to revert to a backup that wasn't the most recent one.

So maybe a scheduled task, one folder that's updated daily and another that's updated weekly? What happens if the computer is off at the scheduled time? Does it just do it the next time it's turned on?

cormie · 05-12-2018 08:21AM

Hi again, I had also posted this issue on the Thunderbird forum and got this reply:

the following saved into a file called backup.bat will copy your Thunderbird profile folders when executed

xcopy %appdata%\Thunderbird\*.* /s

Where is the drive letter the copy will be made to.

See https://www.computerhope.com/xcopyhlp.htm

Would this work for what you're suggesting do you think?

05-12-2018 01:09PM

Pretty much. I'd use robocopy instead of xcopy though, xcopy is older and has less features. Something like this command:

robocopy "%appdata%\Thunderbird\" "C:\tb-backup" /MIR /COPY:DT /mt:64 /np /xj /w:1 /r:1

That'll sync everything in the Thunderbird folder to C:\tb-backup, meaning if anything has been edited or removed from the source, it'll also be changed in the destination. After running, C:\tb-backup will be an exact copy of %appdata%\Thunderbird\. You do need to be careful to never modify the files in the destination, otherwise you could accidentally end up deleting files from both unintentionally.

Then you'd just set up a scheduled task in Windows to run the .bat file. If you wanted multiple backups, say daily and weekly, you could have two scheduled tasks with different destinations set, e.g. C:\tb-backup-daily and C:\tb-backup-weekly

cormie · 05-12-2018 09:49PM

That's brilliant, thanks a lot. I've never done anything like this before, so will give it a shot when I get a chance. Really appreciate it

Stop Backup and Syncing on battery

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