For some reason, and I can’t explain it, creating a backup of my laptop has been weighing on my mind. I haven’t gotten my Windows Home Server up and running yet thus I’m having to do it by hand right now. Since I am about to take a cross country flight I decided to take a snapshot of things before heading out. My tool of choice is RoboCopy which is included with Vista.
So I don’t have to stare at the robocopy help screen again here’s how I backuped up my files to my external Western Digital 400GB My Book drive using RoboCopy. Mainly I’m posting this for me so I won’t have to stare at the command switches again.
robocopy c:\ f:\DellD820Backup /e /efsraw /copyall /dcopy:t /r:0
personally for me, I just like the command line
why not use vista’s backup?
robocopy is great for backing up to a network share or NAS where vista backup wont’ allow it. But for direct attached storage, vista backup is good.
I don’t use RoboCopy to back up the entire disk, that’s what Vista Backup, which is image based, is for… but I do use it to just back up my *important* files to an external HDD. Having them on the external HDD makes it easy to access them if/when I need to restore from a backup, and they’re transportable.
Here’s my scripts:
robocopy “D:\projects” “E:\backups\projects” /MIR /COPYALL /V /NP /R:10 /W:30
robocopy “C:\Users\Steve” “E:\backups\Users\Steve” /MIR /COPYALL /V /NP /XF ntuser.dat* /XD AppData “Application Data” “Local Settings” Links Searches /R:10 /W:30