Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Do I Need any special hardware or any particular type of backup drive?
A: No. ZtB can use ANY external or internal hard disk drive or flash drive as the backup device. If you are using an external drive, the project will be automatically run every time the drive is connected. For both internal drives and always-connected external drives, the project can (optionally) be run at regular intervals, configurable through options dialog.

Q: Do you support backup to network drives?
A: Yes. However, automatic backup to network drives is turned off by default. If you think it will not adversely affect your network (or your bandwidth, in case your network drives are located at a remote location), you can turn it on from ‘Options’ dialog. When automatic backup to network drives is turned off, you can still create a backup project with target folder located in network drive, but you will have to load and run the project manually when you need to perform the backup.

Q: How is this better than me copying the folders manually?
A: First, you just need to specify the source and target folders only once. The project then runs automatically every time the drive is connected. You don’t even need to run the backup tool OR click on ZtB screen. Backup starts as soon as you connect the drive to the computer. Second, only the modified files and folders are copied. So the backup times (and the drive wear and tear) are greatly reduced.

Q: Why is the requirement that all the target folders of a project MUST be in the same drive? A: The project file itself will be created on the target drive, eliminating any other artificial means of associating a particular project with a particular drive. This allows us to support much wider variety of drives than is possible otherwise. If your target folders are spread across different drives, simply create one project for each of those drives. ZtB can handle any number of projects on a given machine.

Q: Can I use the same backup drive to backup from different machines? (Won’t there be a confusion/conflict)? A: Yes, you can. There will be no conflict at all. The project files will be kept separate (as long as you name them differently) and project created from one machine will not be run on another. Just make sure that you don’t backup files from different machines into the SAME target folder.