zpaqfranz

[Vortex]

zpaqfranz: advanced multiversioned archiver, with HW acceleration and SFX (on Windows)

Swiss army knife for backup and disaster recovery, like 7z or RAR on steroids, with deduplicated "snapshots" (versions). Conceptually similar to the Mac time machine, but much more efficiently. zpaq 7.15 fork.

https://github.com/fcorbelli/zpaqfranz

I use both of the Windows and Linux versions of zpaqfranz for incremenal backups. Strongly recomended.

[John Z]

Thanks Vortex!

For windows the built-in Win7 image backup has been a life saver for me several times.  However for some quirky reason it failed for a while so I tried Paragon free version which worked OK but I never tried/needed to restore with it.

This looks much better so even though Win7 image backup works again, it is not incremental, so I'm going to look into this one.  Firm believer in system backups!  If you are happy with it I'm sure I will be too.

John Z

[Vortex]

Hi John,

zpaqfranz is for file \ folder backup and not designed to do system backups. You would like to check wimlib for operatins system backups :

https://wimlib.net/

[John Z]

Hi Vortex,

Well hmmmm, guess I missed that on the zpaqfranz web page document... Thanks
Still since I've been duping 'files' onto USB and external SSD drives it may simplify that.

Thanks for the WimLib tip.  I always do system image backup first then often separate 'files' copies between images since Win7 image is not useful for getting an isolated file un-archived.

John Z

[Vortex]

Win10XPE, a customized Windows Preinstallation Environment with graphical interface is very suitable for offline system backups :

https://theoven.org/viewforum.php?f=14

[Vortex]

The original zpaq project by Matt Mahoney :

zpaq is a free and open source incremental, journaling command-line archiver for Windows, Linux and Mac OS/X. Incremental means that when you back up your hard drive, for example:

  zpaq add e:\backup.zpaq c:\*

then only those files whose last-modified date or size has changed since the previous backup are added. For 100 GB of files, this typically takes about a minute, vs. an hour to create the first version. Journaling means that the archive is append-only. When you add files or directories to the archive, both the old and new versions are saved. You can recover old versions by specifying the date or version number, for example:

  zpaq extract e:\backup.zpaq c:\Users\Bob -to tmp -until 2013-10-30

will extract all the files and directories in c:\Users\Bob as of the last backup on or before Oct. 30, 2013 and put them in a directory named tmp.

https://mattmahoney.net/dc/zpaq.html

[John Z]

Thanks Vortex,

That is a good link with many explanations. 
I made a pdf(cheap version  ) of the manual, (print to pdf)
attached here for offline viewing or if one just wants
to view the capabilities.  Very well thought out utility imo.

I might do a front-end GUI for it if I decide to use it
regularly.  Basically build the command line from GUI
choices then submit to the OS.  I did this for two of my
older command line programs.

John Z

[Vortex]

Hi John,

Thanks for the pdf document. You can try Bandzip, a GUI based tool capable of extracting .zpaq archives :

https://www.bandisoft.com/bandizip/