Topic: Advanced/Simple backup question...

[chris snow]

I have a customer that requires frequent backup of certain files.  They have a few employees whose work/time is critical, and lost/corrupted files have a large impact.

They have asked me if I can do an incremental backup of certain files every twenty minutes.

I was thinking of running tar through a cron job, that appends files that have changed to a tar archive.  At the moment, space is not an issue.  I am more worried about tar trying to create an archive on files (primarily word documents) that are being worked upon by the users at the time tar runs.

Is there a possibility that tar can damage/corrupt word documents if they are open and being worked upon by users at the time the backup occurs?

Any feedback will be appreciated.

TIA

Chris

[Ralph]

We have been thru the same problem. You may want to try this program called Second Copy, at http://www.centered.com that worked well for us.

[Arnie]

Chris,

As far as I know, when Word opens a file for editing, it opens the original file as READ-ONLY and opens a second file with the first letter of the filename changed to a "~". All changes are made to the "~" named file and when you close the file, word closes the "~" named file, deletes the original file then renames the "~" named file to the original file's filename. (I hope that made some sense. I just woke up!)

As long as you don't backup any files with "~" as the first letter, you should be fine.