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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.
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.
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