RoboTask forum

Our organization (2800+ employees, 49 servers, 24 locations) uses hard
disk backup with SAN's or RAID arrays for everything. One thing I would
love to see in RoboTask is a more advanced file sync/copy module.
Perhaps this could be an add-on module (even if there was a small
charge). A good starting point would be to look at the features of
FolderClone/FolderMatch. For example, with RoboTask there is only an
include/exclude mask, but no selection list. Another feature missing
with even FolderClone is the ability to create incremental or
differential backups (for example, comparing two folders, then writing
the changes to a third). With abilities like being able to send
commands to remote machines and receive email when a task completes,
RoboTask could be perfect for Enterprise-class backup. It just needs
some more muscle in the file management and synchronization areas.

I would be happy to give more concrete examples or show anyone how we use RoboTask now.

We appreciate any feedback from our users. Of course you may send any examples you want, and we will enrich our collection of examples. Mail me to address oleg(at)robotask.com. By the way: additional examples are here (http://www.robotask.com/samples/).

To improve the "Synchronize Folders" action to do what I want, you
could add buttons next to the Include Masks and Exclude Masks. The
buttons would open another window showing a folder/file list from
"Folder 1" and allow you to easily to select which folders and files
you want (or don't want, for excludes). Essentially it would just be a
GUI window to build a custom set of "masks."

For differential backups, you would need to add another action (you
could even just call it "Differential Backup"). This action would be
almost the same as the "Synchronize Folders" action, but would have a
"Folder 3" box. It would work just like the "Synchronize Folders," but
instead of overwriting "Folder 2," it would write the changed
folders/files to "Folder 3." The "Exact copy in Folder 2" option would
probably just be dropped.

If these two capabilities ever make it into a new version of RoboTask,
it will dramatically improve its usefulness for performing backups to
disk storage space (and I could probably sell a lot of people on using
RoboTask for that purpose).

Thank you. I wrote this into our ToDo list.