I know I said I would show how to restore from a bad flash on a droid, but I honestly havent had a chance just yet. But I just got an external drive that I am not doing automated backups to so I thought I would share the information.

I like xcopy, just because it is installed on all windows computers. It is a simple application that just copies the data, but it can do things like copy data newer than a given point and synchronize files on a local or network drive. We actually just did a user home directory migration using xcopy just because it works that well.

Today we are just doing local, so this is more of an update to a pervious post

First we want to setup out script with the select directories. Because this my desktop that we are working on I didn’t want to back up everything just my documents and pictures so I did that in the .bat file.

notepad backups.bat

xcopy c:\users\smcgroarty\Desktop  e:\Backups\Desktop\ /e /d /c
xcopy “c:\users\smcgroarty\Documents e:\Backups\Desktop\ /e /d /c
xcopy “c:\users\smcgroarty\My Music“ “e:\Backups\My Music\” /e /d /c
xcopy “c:\users\smcgroarty\My Pictures”  “e:\Backups\My Pictures\” /e /d /c

Save the file, and run it manually to make sure everything processes correctly. If you run it twice, than it should take a lot less time since the /d option is only for files that have a newer time stamp on the source than on the destination.

Next we want to set it as a Scheduled Task so that it will always run, on lets say Wednesday evenings at 10:24PM

We need to go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Task Scheduler

In Windows 7 we are going to select “Create Basic Task”

Give it a simple name, like Backups or LocalBackups, the description is optional but I always like to include it.

Select Next and give it a time you want it to run, and then next will let you select the time.

Selecting Next will allow you to start a program, and then browse to the location of the backup script you created.

Select Next and then finish, and then Bob’s your uncle, the task will be up and going once a week at the random time you specified.