Backup to External

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Krayzie135

Gawd
Joined
Jul 27, 2005
Messages
641
i bought an external drive to backup all my pics and music onto and want to know whats the best way to do it. should i just copy and paste all the files or is there a better way?
 
My solution is a little old school... an old-fashioned DOS batch file. I run it every few nights to backup my files to my external.

When you run it, it only copies the new or changed files.

On my internal drive I have:

d:\music
d:\pictures

and the batch file copies it to:

p:\music
p:\pictures


The external drive then has exactly the same files as the internal. So, it's basically a mirror.

It will take a while to copy all the files the first time. But the batch file then only copies new or changed files, so it's much quicker each time you run it.

Here is the batch file:

set drive=p:\​
set backupcmd=xcopy /s /c /d /e /h /i /r /k /y​

%backupcmd% "d:\download" "%drive%\download"​
%backupcmd% "d:\pictures" "%drive%\pictures"​
Just change P to the letter of your external drive.

It's better than a normal copy/paste because it looks at the files and only copies the new or changed files... which saves a lot of time.
 
how do you exactly make a batch file? this is what i want my external to do. basically updated the newer files instead of of putting the whole folder again
 
SyncToy will do exactly what you want, and it is free from Microsoft. I use this on my computer and my wife's computer to back files up to a server, which would work roughly the same as an external drive. It also gives options for how to handle duplicate files and such.
antok86 said:
how do you exactly make a batch file? this is what i want my external to do. basically updated the newer files instead of of putting the whole folder again
Click to expand...
This is exactly what I meant above, in terms of the options SyncToy gives you.
 
DeaconFrost said:
SyncToy will do exactly what you want, and it is free from Microsoft. I use this on my computer and my wife's computer to back files up to a server, which would work roughly the same as an external drive. It also gives options for how to handle duplicate files and such.

This is exactly what I meant above, in terms of the options SyncToy gives you.
Click to expand...

doesnt seem to be updated. and doesnt work on vista x64. wont install
 
antok86 said:
how do you exactly make a batch file? this is what i want my external to do. basically updated the newer files instead of of putting the whole folder again
Click to expand...

Right click anywhere, and make a new text document. Start with this:

set drive=p:\

set backupcmd=xcopy /s /c /d /e /h /i /r /k /y

%backupcmd% "d:\download" "%drive%\download"

%backupcmd% "d:\pictures" "%drive%\pictures"

Save it as backup.bat or something.

Add any other folders that you want. To copy your My Documents folder, add this:

%backupcmd% "%USERPROFILE%\My Documents" "%drive%\My Documents

It works pretty well... been using it for years. It's just a nice way to dump your files to an external, and only copies new or changed files.
 
antok86 said:
doesnt seem to be updated. and doesnt work on vista x64. wont install
Click to expand...
It doesn't need to be updated, and it will install just fine on Vista x64....it just needs a dll file replaced for it to run. Let me know if you need more details about it. It works perfectly for what the OP is looking for, and easy enough for my wife to use it.
 
where can i get the dll file?
EDIT: i cant even install synctoy says i dont have privilages but im on admin account..:confused:
EDIT: ok i got it to install, it doesnt let me install to another directory. it installed on the default that shows up. but crashes now
EDIT: got it working..seems to do what i need. using the contribute option.
 
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