November 14, 2005
Robocopy
I cannot stress the importance of backing up your data, especially when there exist so many inexpensive ways to do it. Sure, you can spend a lot of money on software & hardware combos that will cost you lots of $$; but being a thrifty consumer, I opt for the inexpensive solution. Simply enough, get yourself an as-large-as-possible external hard drive (two if you can afford it) and download Robocopy, a free utility available from Microsoft (either as a stand alone or as part of the Resource kit). Once installed, it is as simple as the following:
robocopy C:\ F:\backup_110305_c /MIR /R:0 /W:0 /REG /V /ETA /LOG:D:\robo.log /TEE
This MIRrors the C drive to the F:\\backup_110305_c directory, Retrying 0 times, Waiting 0 seconds, REGistering the previous as the default in the REGistry, Verbosely displaying output, showing the ETA for each file, LOGging the output, TEEing (outputting) to the log & console.
You can use the built-in Task Scheduler in Windows to schedule this to run nightly, on as many drives as you have access to.
If you use this, you will never know the grief of not having backups. I cannot tell you how many clients & customers who have come to me after the fact, when there is little I can do (except to try a data-recovery service, which is not the inexpensive route).
robocopy C:\ F:\backup_110305_c /MIR /R:0 /W:0 /REG /V /ETA /LOG:D:\robo.log /TEE
This MIRrors the C drive to the F:\\backup_110305_c directory, Retrying 0 times, Waiting 0 seconds, REGistering the previous as the default in the REGistry, Verbosely displaying output, showing the ETA for each file, LOGging the output, TEEing (outputting) to the log & console.
You can use the built-in Task Scheduler in Windows to schedule this to run nightly, on as many drives as you have access to.
If you use this, you will never know the grief of not having backups. I cannot tell you how many clients & customers who have come to me after the fact, when there is little I can do (except to try a data-recovery service, which is not the inexpensive route).