Unattended Backup Details
How does MyOtherDrive unattended backup work?
Set up a schedule for when unattended backup should run (by choosing days of week and time). Then
choose the folders from your computer to backup, and then choose where these folders and files should
be sent (within your MyOtherDrive account). Additionally, you can choose to have our system send you
(and others) an email of the unattended backup operation results after it completes.
When the scheduled time arrives, our online backup program will be started and will begin copying the folders
and files you choose to our servers. If you want to monitor the backup progress, you can log into our
File Management service and click the Backup button on the toolbar, and then click the 'View Progress' button
to monitor its progress.
Any new files that have been placed into the selected source folders and any changed files will be automatically
uploaded to our service. If a file has not changed, it will be skipped. To determine if a file has changed, our
system computes a 'signature' of the file (called an MD5 hash) which it stores along with every file in our database.
As our system encounters each file on your computer during the backup process, it determines if the file on your computer
has the same MD5 signature as it does in our database. If they differ, the file is uploaded.
To prevent file deletions from being cascaded to our server, by default we do not 'transmit' deletes from your local
computer to our server. That way, if you delete a file, and the next day realize you need it, you will be
able to find that file on our server. If you want this 'synchronized' behavior, check the 'synchronize' option. This will
force the destination folder to look exactly like the source folder, applying deletes as necessary to make it match.
When you set up a scheduled backup on a Windows computer, our system will create a Scheduled Task
with the name 'MyOtherDrive-Backup.' You can edit this scheduled task directly if you would like for
further refinement of the scheduling parameters. For example, you should make sure to have the option 'Wake the computer
to run this task.' This option is set by default on Vista, but may need to be set from the Task Scheduler on older
versions of Windows. For Linux and Mac users, the command line needed to run the scheduled backup is shown. This command line
will need to be executed by a Cron job.
See our online backup help page for detailed step-by-step instructions on how to set up an unattended backup so you can be confident your data is safely backed up.