Vista Robocopy for Backup

TechRepublic has an excellent video, and a text article.  I have been slow in moving toward Vista, but I now have a few installations to deal with.

The basis of this video and article is that often one wants to have extra backups of certain critical files.  I do this because quite frequently I want to get a limited amount of data from a backup, but don’t actually need to restore the whole thing.

For example, I recently had to replace a complete server.  Now this server is really such only in name as it’s on a very small peer-to-peer network, but it does have the management software for this small business and centralizes the data for that one program.  Thus if I had a problem that simply required me to restore the backup to a new hard drive, for example, I’d want a complete system backup, but in this case we decided to replace the entire machine.

New, clean system!  Now all I had to do was reinstall a small set of software, along with the data for that one management program.  Since I schedule a daily backup of just the required data files, which I save on an external drive, all I had to do was plug in the external drive and restore those few files. Now I’ll replace that plan with the script that’s described here.

While quite often a clean install is not necessary, I tend to prefer a clean install when I’ve had major problems.  If I have the install disks and/or files for the packages that are installed, this process can actually be quite fast.  A few minutes of thought now can save hours later.