Incremental photo backup

[Mozziephotography]

Bought my dearest and dearest a 1TB external hard drive to put the thousands of images she's taken over the years. I only want to backup the PICTURES folder. Is it possible to do an incremental backup next time around OR will I have to load the whole folder up again and delete the previous one.

 

[neil_g]

how did you back it up to start with?

 

[Mozziephotography]

Copied folder and then pasted it onto the drive

 

[neil_g]

you could use a batch file.

open up notepad. paste in the following:

xcopy "c:\pathtobackup\" "d:\backuptopath\" /d /e /c /y
pause

amend the c:\pathtobackup\ to be the folder you want to copy and d:\backuptopath\ to be the external drive/folder you want to copy to.

explanation of the switches used:

/d - Copies files with a newer modified stamp than the destination (i.e. will only copy new/modified files)
/e - Copies all folders including empty ones
/c - Continues copying even on error
/y - Suppresses overwrite prompt

if you want to do multiple locations just copy and paste the whole lot onto the next line and change the paths. e.g.:

xcopy "c:\pathtobackup1\" "d:\backuptopath1\" /d /e /c /y
xcopy "c:\pathtobackup2\" "d:\backuptopath2\" /d /e /c /y
pause

save the notepad as "backup.bat" to your desktop. run as necessary (or you could schedule it using Task Scheduler). have included the pause so that you can check for errors (might want to take the pause out if scheduling).

 

[Mozziephotography]

Cheers neil_g - you certainly know your stuff!

 

[Bristolian]

You could also use SyncToy which is free to download and use from the Microsoft website

 

[afasoas]

I would use robocopy over xcopy. It will automatically skip identical files that already appear in the destination path.

robocopy <source folder> <destination folder> <files> <options>​

1) Simplest example:

robocopy c:\users\username\pictures e:\picturesbackups *​

2) Include subdirectories including empty ones:

robocopy c:\users\username\pictures e:\picturesbackups * /E​

3) Check the source directory for changes in a minute and if more than one change has occured, update target directory:

robocopy c:\users\username\pictures e:\picturesbackups * /E /MON:1​

So this latter command will run continuously and will keep the backup drive always in sync. In reality, you probably want to create a scheduled task that will run the second robocopy command once per day.

Here's a useful article on robocopy:
http://burpee.smccme.edu/studenthowtos/robocopy.htm


The one time I tried synctoy, was the last time. It wasn't that amazing.

 

[neil_g]

yes robocopy is a lot more powerful, was just going for no frills simplicity.

 

[Mozziephotography]

Thanks everyone. Spending a bit of time sorting out my OWN Lightroom catalogue as well.