Backing up Digital Photos…. or anything else with Robocopy
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 | Author: admin
At home I run a mixed enviroment of Macs and PC’s. I backup my Windows Server 2003 using Robocopy. I have a shared drive for my Digital photos that I backup to two external USB drives. One of the drives stays at home and the other I keep at work and only bring it home once a month to refresh it with the new data.
Robocopy is a free ulitity provided by Microsoft to copy/backup files and folders. It has many options and can get pretty complex but we’ll focus on the basic backup functions:
ROBOCOPY C:DATA Z:BACKUP /E /R:0 /TEE /LOG:”z:Backuplog.txt” /NP
This example will copy a folder “C:DATA” with all its sub-folders and files to a different drive “Z:BACKUP”
Here’s what all the switches mean:
/E Copies all subdirectories (including empty ones). /R:0 Specifies the number of retries on failed copies. /TEE Displays output in the console window, by /LOG or /LOG+. /LOG: This creates a Log file of the backup /NP Turns off copy progress indicator (% copied).
To use the script paste the line on code into notepad and save the file with a “.BAT” extension. This would make it a Batch file. You can schedule it to run as you please using “Scheduled Tasks” from your windows “Control Panel”.
You can download Robocopy along with many other Utilities here:
Please be carefull when using this utility and only use the /MIR option if you know what you’re doing. The example above is a basic safe backup you can exclude files and other advanced options by reading the “Robocopy.doc” included in the download.
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