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Best free obscure software

Sorry, I worded that poorly. Files in use, including (but not limited to) operating system files (and settings).
 
GreNME said:
Sorry, I worded that poorly. Files in use, including (but not limited to) operating system files (and settings).
Click to expand...

Windows I assume?

ETA:

One sort of hacked-way of doing this would be to employ a copy of VMWare converter, which is free. That will back up everything by creating a VM image of the drive while it's running. The drawback is you need a network mount to push the image to, as it's bad form to create the vm image on the disk you're backing up. I'm not sure how that fits in with what you want to do, but you could make it work in a roundabout way. Once created you could migrate that machine's use to an ESXi server and keep snapshots (or run it in virtualbox and keep snapshots.)

rsync will handle files in use for unix systems. all my backups at home are done via ZFS pools and mirroring (BSD and OpenSolaris are currently really the only OS' that will support ZFS fully, though you can get OS X 10.5 to do so with a developer package install.)
 
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Ducky said:
Windows I assume?
Click to expand...

As far as I know, yes (a friend asked).

I'd also suggest ESXi for such a setup, if only because it allows for a better test environment (the friend said this is a non-production-critical machine, hence no commercial backup). Backing up a virtual disk is a whole lot easier than backing up an entire hard drive with an operating system installed. Whether he has the hardware to set up ESXi (he'd need an external set of drives for the VMs, yes?) I'm not sure, but I'm mostly sure he's not inclined to spend more money on this particular situation.

I'll have him check out DeltaCopy-- essentially a version of rsync for Windows. I don't know if it can handle files in use (since Windows handles such files differently), but it might be worth a shot and it's free.

Hey, and it's also another app to add to the list of software here!
 
GreNME said:
Sorry, I worded that poorly. Files in use, including (but not limited to) operating system files (and settings).
Click to expand...

The backup program included with Windows XP does "shadow copy":
From the Help file...
Volume shadow copy overview
Windows XP allows you to create shadow copy backups of volumes, exact point-in-time copies of files, including all open files. For example, databases that are held open exclusively and files that are open due to operator or system activity are backed up during a volume shadow copy backup. In this way, files that have changed during the backup window are copied correctly.

Shadow copy backups ensure that:
  • Applications can continue to write data to the volume during a backup.
  • Files that are open are no longer omitted during a backup.
  • Backups can be performed at any time, without locking out users.
​
I've used it to backup my laptop to an external USB HDD. I haven't used anything else with XP, so I can't offer any comparisons.
 
I don't think these were mentioned. Not sure what the criteria for obscurity is though...

XnView - great picture browser/manager/basic editor; much better than irfan

GOM Player - my favourite media player

foobar2000 - very good audio player

and of course VLC - it's not pretty but will play pretty much anything on any platform
 
i def have to agree that blender is darn cool
ive had it about a week
heres a video i just rendered



check out my channel for other collapse animations
rate me please :) lol
 
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