One of the things that has been hugely frustrating about my move to Vista is that the backup tool is “dumbed down”. It only copies files it wants to copy and it requires that you backup C: whether you want to or not. All I wanted to do was schedule a daily backup from my data drive D: to my archive drive V: – I want any type of file copied…just a basic mirror type copy. Apparently this is impossible in the standard windows backup application.
Enter Robocopy – a small command-line utility from Microsoft (included in Vista) that does exactly this. Robocopy can take a source and destination and perform a mirror copy without a problem – and since it’s a command-line application, you can schedule it to run whenever you’d like. It has tons of options to exclude certain files/directories based on name, attribute, date, etc – but the basic command to do a mirror copy is just this:
robocopy d:\ v:\ /MIR
Nifty huh?