Backups – RoboCopy

Now comes the third and final long job - the initial backup.

The first time we backup your laptop drive to the external drive, almost every file on your hard drive will be backed up.

• Resist the temptation to clean up your hard drive first.

The initial run will take place overnight; why do you care how long it takes - you will be asleep.

Deleting a few "useless" files defeats our purpose. We want to get EVERYTHING on to the backup drive, so that a systems guy/gal can retrieve that vital bit of data that seemed useless to us at the time.

Download a copy of RoboCopy from this Microsoft web page .

This will store a file "rktools.exe" on your hard drive.

Once the download is complete, execute the RKTools executable file, and accept all the installation defaults.

This will place a file "robocopy.exe" in a folder "C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools" on your hard drive. It will place a great many more files in that folder, amongst them "robocopy.doc", but you don't need to read that file yet, if ever.

If you try to execute RoboCopy,.exe by double-clicking it, nothing will happen. It is a DOS command-line program, but relax - help is at hand!

Open Notepad and create a three-line text file; let's save it as "Backup.BAT".

Here is a text version of the file; you could copy and paste this text directly into Notepad:

TITLE %0 - EFFECT THE BACKUP PROCESS FOR A SINGLE DRIVE
if not exist X: "C:\Program Files\TrueCrypt\TrueCrypt.exe" /q /lX  /v\Device\Harddisk1\Partition1
RoboCopy C:\ X: /s /r:0 /w:0 /xx
"C:\Program Files\TrueCrypt\TrueCrypt.exe" /dismount X /force /q
REM END

When you execute the batch file, perhaps by double-clicking on it, a DOS window will pop up.

You will be prompted by TrueCrypt to enter your password.

That done, TrueCrypt will begin copying files from your hard drive to your external drive.

This initial backup run will take (not "may take") several hours.

Go to bed.

In the morning, open Windows Explorer and TrueCrypt.

Use TrueCrypt to gain access to the external drive "X:".

Right-click and choose properties for each drive and check the space used on each drive.

The space used on the external drive should be close too, but less than the space used on your hard drive.

Why "less than"? because Robocopy will not copy your Windows paging file, and this is commonly one or two gigabytes.

What to do if the space differs ?

Next: What you should do Nightly

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