Easy file backup procedure

[MikeDingas]

Capt. Weasel gave us all a good shake up when he told of his computer crash and lost work. If you are backing up your files, good for you. If, on the other hand, you are procrastinating for one reason or another, here's a simple solution but a long explanation.

First, backing up your files on the same hard drive is a like wearing black pants and peeing down your leg. It will give you a temporary warm feeling but you know you still have a problem!

A separate hard drive for backup is mandatory and can reside on another PC if, like me, you have a home wireless network. Or it can simply be an external drive. Today's technology has produced 6 Gbyte thumb drives that plug into a USB port. Can't get much simpler than that. There are also large external drives available that connect to other input devices on the computer. The procedure I'm about to describe employs two drives on the same PC.

Create a text file, the location is not important, called 'backup.bat'. Edit the file and include the following line:

xcopy c:\hobby\*.* d:\hobby /m /c /e /y

When executed, backup.bat will copy all files located on C:\hobby to d:\hobby. The four switches are: /m (copies only files with the archive bit set and resets the archive bit after copying) , /c (continue on error), /e (copy directories and subdirectories) and /y (suppress prompting to overwrite files). The command is easily modified to copy across a local area network, too.

This file can be executed manually at a Windows command prompt. Better yet, use the Scheduling feature of Windows to run the file automatically whenever and at what frequency you want! Go to Control Panel and double click the Scheduled Tasks icon. Add a new task, name it what you want. Change the tasks properties to run the newly created batch file and adjust the schedule time as desired. Once completed, the backup will run automatically, so long as the PC is powered up.

Any new file created or existing file modified will have the archive bit set. So now you have no reason to loose valuable work.

[Paul S WI]

Good advice Mike. I tell friends all of the time to backup, backup, backup and often. Now with WinXP and an external HD. I just grab the folder from the C drive and drop it in the External Drive. Badda bing, Badda boom done. I'll have to try your method again. I haven't done that since I quit using DOS, years ago. But it was fun then.

[popsshop]

I am fortunate to have a cd burner and that's where I copy all my pattern and picture files. Do I about once a month. (Probably should do it about once a week and a CDRW.)

[MikeDingas]

Manually dropping a folder to an external drive still requires a conscious effort on one's part. An automated process doesn't care whether you remember or not. It also only copies files that need to be copied so it's quicker.

Using a CD burner is fine but as someone else pointed out, you can't edit those files without first copying them to another media. My plan is to burn a CD whenever my pattern supply gets to the capacity of a CD. CD's are relatively inexpensive but I think it a waste for backup purposes. Especially if you backup as frequently as you should.

[Dragon]

I drop and drag patterns and file to another drive. For pictures I burn onto a cd. There are some programs that will let you add to the cd until it is full without having a CD-RW. I burn on a regular cd and add until it is finished.
Diane