Basic But Effective Backup Software

After a few years of using vice versa backup software, and attempting to use Acronis (urgh) I just discovered Windows Robocopy!

Its been built into Windows for a while (doh!) and works really well (hooray!)

I prefer to have two separate harddisks running on my home server. D for data and E for backup. Both are 2TB (they died) 4TB in size. I dont want mirroring because I dont want to automatically mirror any mistakes I might make. I don't like big bulky and bloated backup software. I don't mind one liner command prompts... I also like free stuff.

This is how I did it:

Put this in a batch file (on a single line):

robocopy D:\ E:\ /MIR /XD "D:\$RECYCLE.BIN" "D:\System Volume Information" /R:10 /W:10 /LOG+:"D:\RoboCopyLog.txt"

Where:

D:\ = source
E:\ = destination
/MIR = mirror everything
/XD = exclude directories
/R = number of retries if failure
/W = seconds to wait between retries
/LOG+ = append to log file

Run the batch file from windows task scheduler e.g. every night at 4am. It will need to be run under an administrator account.

I have about 1.5TB of data to backup - it only takes approx 30 seconds to run if there were no changes. Sweet!

Cheap and effective. Hope it can help you...