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Legacy Forums => Experienced User Forum => Topic started by: chris snow on September 24, 2003, 12:06:08 AM
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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
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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.
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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.