John Walker Live

Blogging from Hoboken, NJ...or wherever I happen to be connected from ;)

Search

Flickr Photos

www.flickr.com

This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from John Walker. Make your own badge here.

Robocopy - Where have you been all my life

I don't quite know why I've never used Windows' RoboCopy tool in the past. I've always used XCOPY to move files around at the Windows command line, but RoboCopy is just sooo much better. I haven't had to do much command line file manipulation in the past, but with lots and lots more data on my PC, I find I now need to run scripts to backup files and folders more frequently now.

Windows Vista has a pretty good backup utility, but my biggest gripe with it is that you cannot choose which folders and files to back up. Basically it tries to be "Smart" and will automatically go out and find files like photos, videos, documents, etc. and will back them up. Unfortunately, this means it will miss a lot of things I need backed up like source code and Virtual PC image files. So, I'm using Windows Vista's Task Scheduler to run some batch files to automatically back up that stuff.

Enter RoboCopy...

The simple syntax for Robocopy is the following:

C:\> robocopy C:\DocumentsINeedBackedUp E:\MyBackupLocation

I find that using the /MIR flag is great too, because it will mirror an exact copy of the source directory into the destination directory. Great stuff. So, using the above example, here's the syntax:

C:\> robocopy C:\DocumentsINeedBackedUp E:\MyBackupLocation /MIR

This ensures that the contents of E:\MyBackupLocation exactly matches the C:\DocumentsINeedBackedUp location. If a folder is removed from the source location, it is removed from the destination location. An exact copy.

The greatest thing about RoboCopy is that it really is "Smart". It won't copy over items that haven't been changed. This is fantastic, especially when you have very large files to copy over. If the file hasn't changed, no time wasted. Give it a shot. You won't miss XCOPY :)

Tags Windows Command Line RoboCopy

posted by John Walker @ 6/8/2007 2:05:00 AM

Comments

Comments are closed for this post

John Walker Live

Search

Recent Posts

Flickr Photos

Robocopy - Where have you been all my life

Comments