I am looking for a program that will back up my files to my hard drive but will also record whats been transfered so that in the future if i want to back up many files some of which may already be there it will do everything automatically without asking if i want to replace x file etc. Basically a program that backs up only whats not already there without intervation of the user so that my back up drives are always up to date
Program for backing up
- Thread starter Cheekykid
- Start date
If you're looking to back up a certain folder (ie My Documents plus all it's sub folders/files)
Then robocopy is perfect
On XP, you'll have to download it, with Vista/7 it's included
robocopy /e "c:\users\cheekykid\documents" "x:\backup\documents"
If you copy that into notepad and edit the folder names so they fit your purpose.. then save it as backup.bat (not .bat.txt)
The first time you run it, it will copy all files/folders over, the next time, it will only copy files/folders that are new or have been updated (ie a Word doc that has since been saved)
It runs really quickly
Then robocopy is perfect
On XP, you'll have to download it, with Vista/7 it's included
robocopy /e "c:\users\cheekykid\documents" "x:\backup\documents"
If you copy that into notepad and edit the folder names so they fit your purpose.. then save it as backup.bat (not .bat.txt)
The first time you run it, it will copy all files/folders over, the next time, it will only copy files/folders that are new or have been updated (ie a Word doc that has since been saved)
It runs really quickly
all robocopy checks for is if a file doesn't exist in source, then it gets copied to destination
if destination has other files that source doesn't have, it doesn't 'see' or 'look' for them
edit
-if you manually copied some files from source to destination, that would normally be included in the backup, then it would skip over them unless they'd since been updated. robocopy doesn't keep a log files of previous moves as such, it does a full scan of all source/destination files before doing anything.
I have my 60gb music folder backed up using robocopy, it takes about 30 seconds to do a full scan over a gigabit network, impressive
if destination has other files that source doesn't have, it doesn't 'see' or 'look' for them
edit
-if you manually copied some files from source to destination, that would normally be included in the backup, then it would skip over them unless they'd since been updated. robocopy doesn't keep a log files of previous moves as such, it does a full scan of all source/destination files before doing anything.
I have my 60gb music folder backed up using robocopy, it takes about 30 seconds to do a full scan over a gigabit network, impressive
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Do you know of a program that does do this?
I thought Synctoy did, then I discovered it didn't. I found a lot of old music on my backup drive I'd deleted previously.