Automatic backup-to-server on Windows XP

March 7, 2005 9:19 AM

I'm looking for a way to automatically back-up specified directories to a web server under Windows XP.

I recently went through a accidentally-fried-motherboard scare, and it kinda freaked me out that I didn't have backups of my important stuff. So I'm looking for a simple utility to upload stuff to a server on a weekly basis. A set-it-up-once-and-forget-it's-running kind of thing.

posted by billybunny to computers & internet (3 comments total)

This is a perfect job for Scheduled Tasks and a batch script. How do you connect to the file server, FTP or drive mapping?
posted by pmbuko at 10:19 AM on March 7, 2005

FTP. I'll take a look at scheduled tasks, and I haven't used a batch file since like 1997, so this'll be fun.
posted by billybunny at 4:21 PM on March 7, 2005

If you have ssh access to the server, you should consider using rsync to copy the files. Rsync will only copy files that have changed since the last backup, so you can run the backup job more frequently. cwRsync is a Windows version. You'll still need to write batch files and schedule them to run as tasks. This page has some shell scripts for automated backups under Linux, but they can be adapted for use under Windows, and show how to do several of the things you're likely to want, such as incremental backups and excluding specific file types.
posted by yarmond at 10:29 PM on March 7, 2005