Using robocopy to fashion incremental or differential backups?

LeperousDust · 20 Apr 2008 at 02:33

This should be possible with all the switches available, but i can't quite get my head around it. I know i'd need a few scripts set up to acheive this right? One as the main backup, and then others as incrementals just copying changes, but then i realise i probably wouldn't be able write them to different folder names?
Hmmm quite confusing...

K.C. Leblanc · 20 Apr 2008 at 15:12

This might help, it's a GUI tool for robocopy.

oddjob62 · 20 Apr 2008 at 16:02

Shouldn't be hard... looking through the documentation, the main switches you need are
/A : Copy only files with the Archive attribute set.
/M : like /A, but remove Archive attribute from source files.
/A-:[RASHCNET] : UnSet file Attribute(s) on destination files - remove.

Full backup should backup everything and remove the Archive Attribute from each file.
Incremental should only backup files with the Archive Attribute set, then remove the Archive Attribute

LeperousDust · 20 Apr 2008 at 16:05

Hmmmm i'd rather not be setting them as archived and non archived all the time as i use some of the files (in documents folder) a fair bit...

At present i've got what is essentially a mirror, and i was just thinking of how i can make this a little more idiot proof in case i do something silly and back it up

But i'd rather not have multiple mirrors, since i'm backing up over 50Gb of data at a time...

bledd · 20 Apr 2008 at 16:21

if you run robocopy on say 10gb of data, it'll copy the 10gb, then if you added say 20mb to the folder, and edited a few of the original files

it'd only copy the 20mb and the updated files

oddjob62 · 20 Apr 2008 at 16:33

LeperousDust said:
Hmmmm i'd rather not be setting them as archived and non archived all the time as i use some of the files (in documents folder) a fair bit...

How would setting the archive bit make any difference to that? The archive attrib is only used to show that a file has chanced since the the archive attrib was last reset. It's how Full and Incremental backups are normally done.

LeperousDust · 20 Apr 2008 at 17:06

bledd. said:
if you run robocopy on say 10gb of data, it'll copy the 10gb, then if you added say 20mb to the folder, and edited a few of the original files

it'd only copy the 20mb and the updated files

It wouldnt do that if i wasn't copying to the same folder though would it, if you get me? Since i'd not want to overwrite at the destination the data that had been changed/added.

The archive attribute is a possiblity, i'll have a see what i can rustle up, i guess its the simplest solution