Isn't it amazing what you find on the internet. Never fails to surprise me. For instance - this site. Absolutely brilliant. Anyway to get down to my general problem. At this time I do not have a specific request but this could change as time goes on.
I recently purchased two external hard drives. The reason for this was that on one I would archive old files whilst the other would be used to backup current files. The software that came with the hard drives wasn't up to backing up my current files. My computer supports three hard drives which, in turn, are partitioned. In effect sixteen hard drives and it would be necessary, not only to backup files, but also whole drives.
Since the purchase I have tried the following software to run backups and schedule same, Karen's Replicator, Microsoft SyncToy v1.2 and FreeFileSync. I like the idea of incremental backup, saves a great deal of time. In all cases I ended up with corrupt volume files and invariably had to run ChkDsk to restore the indexes. The disk drives have been reformatted and the virus checks have proved negative.
So in a desperate bid to achieve a backup I have resorted to MSDOS. The following is the contents of one of my Bat files:
xcopy G:\*.* y:\"My Backups"\Dir_G\ /s
exit
Two lines but very effective. In addition, no volume corruption. So it appears I am on the right lines. For those interested the explanation behind the above is copy all files on Drive G: to Drive Y (the external hard drive) into folder 'My Backup' and into subfolder ‘Dir G’. No empty folders to be copied: /s.
There are three other Bat files similar to this one which I now run separately. However here’s where the problem arises. The next time I want to run a backup, I don't want it to take 59 minutes, as the above does, because having set the files up, they only need to be incremented. Even delete files that no longer exist and should be removed from the backup.
Consequently two questions arise to which your answers would be favourably received.
1) Is there software out there which would accomplish all of this, at a reasonable cost? And
2) With a stout heart and the correct motivation is it possible to write the program to accomplish all that I desire using MSDOS?
Sorry for the long diatribe but if we can visualise the problem then the solution is at hand.
Thanks in advance.
