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How do I set up a sync between my documents folder and a spare drive?

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DeLorean's Avatar
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Location: Scotland
Experience: knowledge assimilator
20-Nov-2009, 03:34 PM #1
Thumbs up How do I set up a sync between my documents folder and a spare drive?
I recently moved to a 2TB striped raid setup, replacing a setup where i had several independent disks, many with backups of my important files. Now everything is on the raid setup and i fear that if it fails i'd lose everything, much of which goes back up to a decade.

What I'd like to do is have my 'My Documents' folder mirrored onto an external drive. In the past I'd copy stuff manually, but I have 150+Gb of stuff in there and it's time consuming having to routinely overwrite everything each time i backup, especially since very little may have changed or been added since i last did it.

If I had some sort of mirror or sync set up then it would just replace or update changes I have made to my files.

How would I go about this?
TheOutcaste's Avatar
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21-Nov-2009, 12:21 AM #2
SyncBack gets mentioned often here.

Myself, I just use a batch file and robocopy, then run it as a scheduled task each day.

Code:
Set _Src=%Userprofile%\Documents
Set _Dest=G:\Backups\DeLorean\Documents
Robocopy "%_Src%" "%_Dest%" /R:2 /W:5 /SEC /E /XO %*
Switches:
Code:
/R   Number of retry attempts
/W   Time to wait between retries
/SEC Copy with security, copies Data, Attributes, Timesatamp, and Security info (ACL List)
/E   Include subfolders
/XO  Exclude older files
%*   This lets you add switches from the command line.
Handy to specify /L to just list files and not actually copy.

Save as backup.bat for example.
Open a command prompt, navigate to the folder you saved backup.bat in, and type:
backup.bat - will copy files
backup.bat /L - will just list but not copy

Once a week add /purge ( or create a 2nd task) to delete files from the backup that no longer exist on the PC.
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DeLorean's Avatar
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Member with 68 posts.
 
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Scotland
Experience: knowledge assimilator
21-Nov-2009, 01:09 AM #3
Until I noticed the /XO switch I was about to say "That is not what I'm after", but that looks like a smashing, and small solution. Thanks a lot, Outcaste.
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