I've been suing Microsoft's free SyncToy to do backups, and it does a good job. One of its problems, however, is a lack of understanding as far as xmp files go. It can't detect if they have changed or not, so after the first backup/echo/synch it never backs them up again. There is a reason for that explained in a MS forum somewhere, but the point is that it cannot see a change. One reason that I do remember now is that the date doesn't change on an xmp file, since you never open it. You would think you could use SyncToy's "check file contents" option, but that doesn't work on xmp files either.
The other problem with MS ST is that it's too dumb to compare files already in two places and echo/sync them. If you ever change hard drives then you will need to rebuild your echo from scratch--see you in about a day. For some reason it can't say, "Ok he wants me to echo the files on the left to the folder on the right. Now wait, there are files already in the folder on the right. Hmmmm, what shall I do. Well, if MS had it's head out of its ass, I would compare the files on the left with the files on the right, delete the files on the right that are not on the left and update the rest. Uh O, I don't understand that. I'll just copy all of the files over now and then leave all the new files on the left sitting there when I echo again in the future." Who knows what goes through MS's heads. So like I was saying, the other big problem with ST is that it gets confused when you tell it to echo from the left to the right when there are already files on the right.
So what you have to do is delete all of your files on the right, and then rebuild the echo using SyncToy, from left to right. I think Microbrains suggested that it wasn't a problem. You simply had to synchronize the folders instead of echo. So yeah that would work, but you can't change from Synchronize back to echo when you are done. Also, I'm a little paranoid to go back and forth like that. I know the files on the left are the ones I need. I don't need stupid software synchronizing my files on the left and deleting them accidentally because it's IQ is poor.
In a any event, what I want to do is echo right to left with software that can actually understand when an xmp file has changed.
So, what's your solution?