Successful data backup to external, full hard disk

A fictitious assumption: A user has an external hard disk connected to the computer. He uses this hard disk exclusively for backing up his data. This is recommended, as a backup hard disk should only contain backup copies - because everything else on it would not be backed up.

There is a lot of space on today's hard disks. Whereas people used to talk about kilobytes, today it's terabytes and tomorrow it'll be zettabytes (that's 10²¹ bytes). So there is enough space and the user can save a full backup on his external hard disk every time. This concept is good.

But what happens if the hard disk space is exhausted and there is no more memory for new backups? It would be desirable for the backup software to remove older full backups from the data carrier as soon as there is no more space. This would automatically ensure that there is always enough data storage space available on the backup hard disk. And despite all this, several versions exist on the hard disk.

This function has been available in Langmeier Backup for several versions and a small trick is used to address precisely this function: In the backup destination path, where you specify the folder in which the backup should take place, you simply manually insert a so-called variable. Let's say we take the date as the variable. It will look like this:

Backup target path: D:\Backup from [dd.mm.yyyy]

However, to ensure that an older backup folder is deleted if there is no longer enough storage space, this variable also has the so-called FreeUp option. This must be written in lower case and appended to the date with a space:

D:\backup from [dd.mm.yyyy freeup]

In this way, the backup program creates a separate folder for each backup run and deletes an older backup folder if there is no longer enough space on the hard disk. This ensures that at least one backup folder remains on the hard disk. However, if there is only one backup folder left on the hard disk and there is still not enough space, the backup is aborted with the error "Too little space". The reason for this is that otherwise the last existing backup will be lost.

With this little trick, you can be sure that your data will always remain on this external hard disk, even if you make a new backup.