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bug: autobackup cannot be configured to save to user folder, This never worked for me and does not work in 4.1.7 either
 
#1
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I have autobackup set via planner to do regular backups and I have configured external folder for the backups (so I can easily include it in regular machine backups). When I select "Run now", it works as expected. However when the task is started automatically, it always saves the backup to APPDIR where mail folders are located.

Yep, and it would be cool if backup run in background, it is very annoying that it blocks the whole application for 15 minutes.
 
 
 
#2
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to backup theBat, you need to backup the mail folder - and for this purpose it's far better to use some archiver like zip or rar, instead of the unreliable built-in backup tool (I have no idea why it exists at all). Backups can be scheduled with Windows task scheduler (theBat has to be closed)

Rar can be adjusted to backup either everything, desired portions, only files modified in the last X days, to update an existing archive instead of creating a new one etc. etc. It will surely do it faster and produce smaller backups, and if you ever need to restore - you can restore only what's really needed and where it's needed.
As you can read in many posts here, restoring backups created with theBat itself often fails.
 
 
 
#3
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I've disabled the autobackup feature, but I've created a backup schedule via TB's scheduler. (Actually I had that running before TB's autobackup feature got implemented.)
When you create an backup schedule yourself, you can set the target path as you wish.
My target for the backup is:
E:\Mijn Backups\The Bat!\%Date="YYYYMMDD".tbk
That way every day a new backup gets created without overwriting the old one, you can use macros in the file name.
For a set of seven backups that get overwritten every week you can use %Date="DDD".tbk as name.
In days past I preferred bigg one's backup schedule, but the problems with unreliable backups are gone in my experience and nowadays it's possible to restore to a different path and to restore a single folder, that couldn't be done in the past (long ago).

I haven't encountered any restoring problems for ages. I test that sometimes as part of my beta testing.
__________________________________
I'm just a user of The Bat! I don't work for Ritlabs.
 
 
 
#4
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bigg one: that is far worse solution. I've been using The Bat! for about 10 years and have very bad experience with restoring data from zipped e-mail folder. From time to time, I need to re-install the whole system or move The Bat! to a new machine (HW upgrade). Moving that data to a clean install is really painful, it requires setting up all accounts again and sometimes it simply does not work. This really got easier with built-in backups.

My current setting is that I backup all data on my machine excluding TheBat! to a backup folder, then TheBat! itself should backup all account to the same folder. The contents of the folder gets synced with external machine once a week. So far all disasters recovered painlessly :-)

Roleof: Thanks a lot, I deleted the autobackup entry and configured it in a similar way, hopefully it will work.
 
 
 
#5
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actually moving theBat to a new machine is a one minute job. You have to move the mail folder, the installation folder, and one registry key. There is no need even to install it, not to mention to create accounts again. If the path to mail folder is different, you only have to tell theBat about it, either through GUI or directly in registry.
I'm glad to know the built-in backup finally works reliably, though I can't enjoy it as I still use 3.x
But if I upgrade to 4.x in the not so near future, I think I'll keep using rar for backups.
 
 
 
#6
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Yep, but do you have the backup of the registry? I do not.
 
 
 
#7
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I make registry backups regularly, as well as backups of everything else important.

But in fact you do not really need to move the registry key. The only really important thing stored there is your registration info, which you can re-enter from the GUI.
Everything important (messages, filters, templates, address books, account settings etc.) is kept in the mail folder.
If you do not move the registry key, theBat will recreate it with default settings on first start.
 
 
 
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