“Robocopy to the rescue?”
Recently I’ve been dabbling into the world of System Administration. As most people already know, this is a rather large world of next to useless information that only System Administrators can truly admire. For the rest of us, it’s a major pain in the you know what. System Administration by itself, serves no true purpose other than to support others. Yet, it has to be done.
Backup systems are one of these pains in the you know where. I did some research for the company I am working for and came to the conclusion that there is no great backup solution. There are just too many complications of trying to cover every possible system, program, environment, person, etc. So, like in Web design (my more experienced area), you try to design a system to accommodate as many situations as possible.
I started out using XCopy as suggested by a Server Admin friend of mine, only to get dreaded error messages. XCopy will not work with filenames or directories that are longer than 255 character, or ones that do not follow ISO-8859-1.
So, I started to look at Robocopy. This program is available as part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Tool Kit. It handles backups much better than XCopy. It will even delete unneeded files at the destination. This feature may cause some issues for some, so be careful.
Once downloaded and installed, you can create a .bat file to run the commands using the Windows Scheduler program. For example, you can call the file “backups.bat” and save it on the C:\ drive. Then use the “Scheduled Tasks” program under your System Tools (Accessories) folder to setup a task that runs nightly at 2:00AM.
The commands for the Robocopy backup are fairly simple, just check the Google.com for the Robocopy commands page. If it couldn’t get any easier, there is now a Robocopy GUI for those who don’t like to dabble in command lines.
Cheers,
Jeff Walters
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