Hey everyone, Daniel from TwinBytes with another tutorial for you. This time I'm going to be
showing you an update to the Cobian Backup which I've done a video on previously and it hadn't
been updated for some time but now they have rebranded it. It's called the Cobian reflector
and I'm going to be reviewing that and showing you exactly how to set it up in this video.
So if you go to Cobiansoft.com you'll see that there's a link here to Cobian backup but
also to Reflector and they're showing right here on the home page Cobian Reflector is in
beta form right now and you can download it right here. So once you go into this
you'll see that it is a replacement to what was Cobian Backup. You can read all about it here
and they do offer this totally free whether it's for personal or business use but they do
take donations. So it's a great idea if you do enjoy this software that
you go down here to make a donation to them. So if we click here for Cobian Reflector it
takes you to another page saying preparing to download and you have to click on the
link here either the icon or the text and it will start downloading the software.
Once it's done downloading you can run it and by default it'll have the English as the official
language by default. You can click in here and choose your preferred language if you like
and go next. You have to read through the license agreement which is actually super short,
very simple. Accept the license agreement and hit next. You can change the location where it's going
to be installing to so if you prefer to go on your second drive you can just simply delete C and put
in D or whatever drive letter it is or click into the dots here and browse for another location.
It's a good idea to create the start menu icons and if you wanted to create a script
for future installations, you could do that as well, but we're not going to get into
that in this video we're going to keep it real simple because there's a lot you can do here.
We'll hit next, by default it's set to run as a service which is great if the computer reboots
and you're not logged in then it's gonna want to run as a service to ensure that the
scheduled backups will run. If you're running the backups manually and you're not doing a schedule
then you can probably stick with application either no auto start, so you'll just open
the program and run it when you want, or have the program open but then you still have the option of
a schedule running or running it manually but scheduled tasks will only run
if that user is logged in. Otherwise you would need to have it run as a service,
so if you're not logged in it will still run your scheduled backups.
We'll leave it as a service for now and hit next.
But before that, a little note, volume shadow copy is a good idea to have if you forget files
open and have clients do this all the time that if they don't close everything at the end of the day
it's not going to back that up unless you have the volume shadow copy requester turned on, but
in that case it doesn't always work. So you can't rely on this even though this feature exists.
So it's always a good idea to make sure you close every program you have open before you
run your backups. We'll hit next and it's now ready to install so we'll hit install.
It's got some other Visual C++ runtime packages that may be required so it's going to download and
install what it needs. If your computer doesn't have these redistributable packages, then it's
going to take a little bit longer to install; and now it's finished with the installation, started
the service because we had that turned on and it's ready to go and it confirmed that it has completed
the installation successfully without any errors. So we'll hit done. When it's installed you'll see
a little white circle down at the bottom and if you hover over it it says Cobian Reflector.
Double click on that and it opens up the program. Now we're able to set up our first
backup task and it runs very similar to the old version of Cobian Backup. So if you're familiar
with that one you may be okay with this and getting around. They have the shortcuts
through the right click and you can create a new task and do different things here
or you can go through the top menu here and you'll find a lot of options there as well.
One of the first things i like to do is going under tools and options.
Under the visuals, we want to put show text on progress bars because when it's
running the backup, we're going to be able to see percentages down here at the bottom,
which is great for keeping an eye on how long it's going to take for the backup to complete.
So let's go and create our first task. We'll go into task and new task and you can give it
a name or just leave it as new task. I like to call it Daily Backup because it should be daily.
You can have it separate the backups if you want to or just have it overwrite every time if you
uncheck that and you want to have it enabled and include subdirectories usually. You can
use the archive feature and also we've got the volume shadow copies that we talked
about earlier which is a good idea to have that on. You also have the options of full
backup versus incremental, differential, and there's a dummy task here as well.
So there's a lot we can go into and we're going to keep it very simple here.
If you don't understand the difference between these backups I do have a video
already I believe that gets into that, and if not let me know.
I can make more detailed advanced videos on the advanced features in this software. So aside from
making sure this is enabled and having a full backup at least, then you want to go into the
files and you can choose what type of file if the individual files the directories if it's gonna
come from an ftp server or you can manually select. I'll just go into directory here and
let's just say we're gonna select my documents and select folder. So it's gonna back up my documents
and you can just keep going add directory and we'll say pictures and then it's going
to back up all those things. You want to have a destination of where it's going to go to.
So you would just choose your backup drive letter whatever that happens to be
and at this point we've got enough information to do a simple backup. We can just hit ok and there's
the backup. It's ready to go, it's showing the source of what it's backing up and where
it's going to and these drive letters don't make sense now that I'm looking at it because
I have everything on the D drive, but you would just have the
source destination as the different drive letter. If you want to edit anything on here
you can right click and go to edit task or when you highlight this go up to task and edit tasks.
So we looked at general and we got the files what to back up where it's going from and to.
You have a schedule which is set to manual by default. You can choose how often you want this
to run, you could even have it on a timer if you wanted to back this up every hour on the hour or
something like that. You can choose all of this usually i would go into say weekly and you can
choose the days of the week. So if it's really just during the week then you just put check marks
on those and click off somewhere else so that goes away and it's set for those days of the week.
You can choose the date time settings so we can specify a new time and pick what time of the day.
You can pick what time of the day that you want to have your task run at. Other features here are
available depending on what type of schedule that you set up. So this is a very standard
one just having the days of the week and what time you want the schedule to run at. There's
many other features in here that you can get into and including some archiving, making it smaller,
filters, events to do before and after. So you could have it execute some tasks, command lines,
start and stopping services. So maybe you need to stop a certain service for it to back up that data
before it will back up successfully and then after the backup then you can start that service again.
There's more advanced settings here as well. So just in case if it needs more permission
then you could click to run the task of someone else and then put in their username and password
and if it's on a domain then you would need to specify your domain there as well. We're
just going to stick with the basics that we got here and that's just using the first three tabs.
We'll hit ok. We do have this set on a schedule to run at eight o'clock at night every weekday,
but we want to run this right now. So all we would do is highlight this task and click on the little
save button here to run this selected task. If you had multiple tasks and you want to run them all,
there is an icon here to run all the tasks. We'll just go to run this one. You want to
run the task now you have the option to check off to shut down the computer when this backup ends
if you want to and then we'll hit ok and then it's going to start running. You'll see at the bottom
it says Cobian Reflector, a backup has started, and if you're looking at the screen you'll be
able to see some text going down showing that it's backing things up. It also shows the percentages
down at the bottom here for the overall progress and the backup for each individual file but each
individual file can go so fast that you're not going to see it move. So the important thing
is seeing the overall backup percentage. If you decide you want to cancel this for now you can
hit cancel and we'll hit yes. You'll see that if there's any errors at all it'll show in red. So
it makes it stand out for you to see exactly what happened but at the end it should say
that the backup completed successfully, how long it took and how much it backed up.
What if we want to have an email log? This one other basic feature
that I find is very helpful if you're monitoring someone else's backups,
is going under the options, you can go into the log file and say mail log files.
So we'll be able to mail them every day or I like to say when a task is done. So whenever that
task is completed then it will just send that mail out but it also reminds you here that
you have to go into the mail tab to configure the settings. So you would go in here and then
put in your sender's information including your mail server address. So that might be something
like smtp.google.com if you're using Gmail for example and the mail recipients you can go into
add and just put in someone's email address for example if you wanted to go to your tech support;
and then most likely you're going to need to authenticate. So then you'd put in your
username and password here and you'll be able to test the mail settings right there;
and that's it for this tutorial, I hope you did find it helpful. If you did,
please do give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing for more. Thanks for watching.