>I will investigate the 7-Zip suggestion. If possible could you send me a sample of command line version you mentioned; mainly the batch that produces the output results. Send it to
GregReichert@GLRsoftware.com. You may have to cut-and-paste the code into the body of email to get email to work.
The content is pretty small. 7-Zip requires a relative folder path structure, so if you were to backup some files from some location, and your data existed at a deeper path than where you started (like .\data\path\*.*), then you'd use formats like this:
You create files containing what you want to backup (one file per line, no double-spaces or anything, just a listing of every file to backup):
data\path\file1.dbf
data\path\file2.dbf
data\path\file2.cdx
etc...
You build the command line with the options you want/need, and create a program called "backup.bat" or whatever you want to call it:
c:\path\to\7za.exe a -y -mx3 -bb3 -bsp0 "c:\path\to\output_file.zip" "@c:\path\to\filelist.txt"
Once those two files are in place, you run backup.bat and it will perform the backup for you. You can also add normal DOS redirect options, like this:
c:\path\to\7za.exe a -y -mx3 -bb3 -bsp0 "c:\path\to\output_file.zip" "@c:\path\to\filelist.txt" >> output.txt
And then post-process output.txt to make sure everything backed up okay. It should look something like this:
7-Zip (a) 18.05 (x86) : Copyright (c) 1999-2018 Igor Pavlov : 2018-04-30
Scanning the drive:
3 files, 12345 bytes (12 MiB)
Creating archive: c:\path\to\output_file.zip
Add new data to archive: 3 files, 12345 bytes (12 MiB)
+ data\path\file1.dbf
+ data\path\file2.dbf
+ data\path\file2.cdx
Files read from disk: 3
Archive size: 12345 bytes (12 MiB)
Everything is Ok
We've had very good luck with this utility. Our software manager uses the -mx3 option for faster backups, but values closer to -mx9 will get you better compression. The only issue we've had is some anti-virus software programs will think 7za.exe is a virus and delete it from the computer when you perform extract operations if the files you're extracting already exist, because 7-Zip will delete each file, then re-create it with the new version. Some anti-virus apps see that happening repeatedly with slightly different content on many files, and concludes you're a virus writing corrupted versions of the real software.
The work-around is to manually delete the files first if they exist. You can use 7za.exe's abilities to list the contents of an archive to get the list of files within, as well as 7za.exe's ability to extract the files, or certain files.
If you have any issues post questions. I should be able to help you.
