Navigation:  Creating a Backup Job > Files and Folders Backup

Backup selected files and folders. Incremental, synchronizing (mirror) and other backup methods are supported.

Click the button "New Job" to begin job creation:

Select "Files and Folders Backup".

You will have to enter a name of the job, and then you will see a Job Creation Wizard. It allows to configure your new backup job.

You need to complete 5 steps:

 

1. What do you want to backup?

Choose here the files and folders you want to backup.

You can apply filter to the source files: Choose the required filter type in the combo: Include only extensions or Exclude Extensions. Then enter the extensions separated by semicolon into the text field.

If you want to see the selected items in a form of list, click at the "View as list" link. It is located at the top right corner of the window.

Click "Next" to go to the next step.

 

2. Where to store your backup?

On this step you need to choose the destination for your backup.

At first, choose the storage type: Local or External Drive, Network, FTP or Cloud.

After that you must specify the path to directory where you want to store the backup every time the job is executed.

•For Local / External Drive.

Choose the disk letter in the first combo. Then click "Choose..." to select the Subfolder using the Directory Dialog. Alternatively you can enter the subfolder path directly into the text field.

•For Network.

You have to specify the path to the network folder in UNC-format. You can enter the path manually, or click "Choose..." button. If the remote location is password-protected, you need to specify the username and password.

•For FTP.

Click "Add..." button to add new FTP account. Configure the FTP settings of the new record, and click "Test" to make sure the program has access to FTP server and is able to create and remove the files. Then click "OK".

New FTP account will appear in the "Account" combo. After that click the "Choose..." button to open the FTP Client.  The client will connect to the FTP account, and will list the files and folders in the root. Now you need to choose a subfolder where you want to store your backups.  When you work in the FTP client, you can see the current path in the address bar. Once the desired path is selected, click the "Select" button.

•For Cloud.

Select the cloud service from the combo: Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive. Now you have to specify the subfolder path. You can do enter it manually, or by clicking the "Choose..." button.  You will be asked to authorize the Perfect Backup application to make changes in your cloud account. When done, you can close the browser window. You will see the Cloud client, and the content of your cloud account is listed there.  Please choose the backup destination folder and click "Select" button.

When everything is configured on this step, click the "Next" button to switch to the next step.

 

3. Choose a backup type.

Here you must select backup method: Incremental, Differential, Full or Mirror.

Please read the topic "Comparison of Backup Methods" for more information about the difference of backup methods.

For Incremental and Differential backup type you need to specify the frequency of the full backup. Creating the full backup is necessary in order to keep the most  backups safe in case of damage of an area of  backup storage  where intermediate copies of data are stored.

Choose one of two options:

- create full backup is the specified number of incremental/differential backups is complete.  For example, for value = 5 the program will create full copy of your data after every 5 incremental/differential backups.

- create full backup if the size of all increments  or the size of the last differential copy exceeds (in percentage) the specified part of the last full backup.  For example, the  value = 40%, the size of the full backup is 1 Gb. The size of the 1st incremental backup  is 100 Mb, the size of the 2nd backup is 90 Mb, the size of the 3rd backup is 300 Mb. So the next time you run a backup, the program will perform full copy of your data. This is because 100 + 90 + 300 = 490 Mb. And 490Mb exceeds the 40% of 1 GB. In other words,  490 > 1024*0.4.

Keep the following numbers of full copies. Set this value greater than 0 if you want to save space on the storage by removing your old backups.

If you want to have several restore points, but you don't need to keep very old copies of data. In this case you can set this value.

For example, this value = 10. Perfect Backup will create first 10 backups of your data. And when you execute a job next time, the program will remove the oldest backup at first, then it will do a backup job for your current data.  Therefore the total number of backups will not exceed 10.

 

4. Want to save storage space?

On this step you are able to set compression and encryption options for backup job.

If you enable ZIP compression, Perfect Backup  at fist adds all source files and folders to the single zip, and then copies archive to destination.

In addition you can protect your backup with password. In this case, even after gaining unauthorized access to the backup storage, an intruder will not be able to read your data without knowing the password.

No Compression Extensions. This is the list of file extensions separated by commas. The source files with these extensions are added to ZIP without compression.  This is because there is no sense to compress some formats of files, e.g. JPG or RAR. Such files  already have internally compressed structure. In most cases you should leave this parameter unchanged.

The last option, "Create individual ZIP file to each item" can be enabled  if you want to backup extra-large files.  This option may be also useful if you backup your data to remote storage, e.g. FTP or cloud, and connection is not so stable.  Let say, the total size of your files is 1 Tb, and connection to FTP server is not stable. In this case the error may occur during the uploading of this single ZIP file. Perfect Backup will try to upload this large 1 Tb file once again, so all previous time is wasted. The total time for such backup may be too long to complete.   Another thing if you enable the option to create separate ZIP file for each source file. In this case even if the upload of some file fails, the program doesn't wast too much time trying to upload again.

 

5. When to start backup?

This step is completely optional. Here you can specify days and time when you want to run backup job automatically.

There are two options to choose from:

- Days of the week.

- Days of the month.

The timetable is applied for all the days selected.

When everything is ready, click "Save" to add new job to the table. Warning! In this case the job is not started immediately. To run backup you have to select the job in the table, then click "Backup" button.

If you want to save new job and run it immediately, please select "Save & Run" item from the dropdown menu of the "Save" button.