How to Synchronize your data to Backup server

Last year I realized the importance of data backup when one of my colleague lost all of his critical data due to Hard disk failure and as usual he didn’t had any backup. So then I thought that it’s better to be Safe than Sorry. After this It occurred to me that my IT department has already provided me quota on backup servers, which I never utilized. IT provided me a batch file (as most of the machines in my organization are on windows), which goes like this:

xcopy c:\data\*.* h:\c-data /c /e /h /y
xcopy D:\data\*.* h:\d-data /c /e /h /y
@echo Backup is complete
@pause

I somehow didn’t like this logic and modified it as per my convenience.

echo Close Outlook
@pause
echo remove stale data
echo Y | rmdir Old\c-data /S
echo Y | rmdir Old\d-data /S
@pause

echo Move Last backup to Old location
move c-data Old\
move d-data Old\
mkdir c-data
mkdir d-data

echo Start backup
echo D | xcopy D:\Dev H:\d-data /c /e /h /y  >backup.log
echo D | xcopy "c:\Documents and Settings\manish.mishra\My Documents" "H:\c-data\My Documents" /c /E /h /y >>backup.log
echo D | xcopy "c:\Documents and Settings\manish.mishra\Desktop" H:\c-data\Desktop /c /e /h /y >>backup.log
@echo Backup is complete
@pause

I used this for few weeks but still it was not an optimized method because it was copying entire data irrespective of the fact whether it was changed or not. It should be incremental.

So I Googled it and found a useful tool from Microsoft for this purpose.

It’s called “SyncToy”. I downloaded and installed it. It’s pretty simple to use and has a very intuitive GUI. I didn’t bother to read all the FAQ’s and Help manuals.

1. So first you need to “Create New Folder Pair”

2. Next Select the folder you want to backed up as “Left Folder”

3. Then select Backup Server location as “Right Folder”

4. Next comes the interesting part. “Synctoy” gives you an option so as to Select what kind of Synchronization you’ll like to perform.

a. Synchronize: This option will check both the left and right folders for “Add/Update/Delete/Rename” and synchronize both of them. This option can be useful in case you want to use Synctoy as a Development repository, when you’re working on the same project but from multiple machines.

b. Echo: This option only compares Left to Right not vice versa. (I chose this one as I don’t need to synchronize Backup server to Local).

c. Contribute: This one is similar to Echo with the only difference being Delete. File which are deleted on Left won’t be synced to Right.

You can change these options later as well.

5. Give this Synchronization pair a Meaningful name so that you can identify it later.

6. After this you’ll get this Pair listed in the Home Screen of the Tool and you can select which Pair you want to Run.

7. Selecting the pair will give you other options as well, which you don’t get at the time of Creating the Pair.

8. You can also click on Preview button which will show you a report displaying all the modified content.

9. Click on Run and you’re done.

Technorati Tags: Synctoy,Backup,Synchronize,Microsoft,Data,Echo,Incremental