Gnomie Joe Collins writes:

Chris,

I was watching your YouTube video about backing up data and I thought I’d pass this little tip on to you. I run a Win XP setup with three hard drives packed with audio files… 25,000 of them!

I never liked any of the backup programs out there, and with the vast amount of data I manage it always was a pain to maintain an up-to-date backup just by dragging and dropping to an external drive. I was looking for a quick and dirty way of making a mirror of my data folders and I found this little utility called XXCopy.

It is a command line utility that greatly enhances the DOS/Windows Xcopy function. Once installed, you can write a simple batch script file to automatically back up any new data that has been added. It will replace any file that has been modified and it will also delete old files in the mirror folder that have been removed from the master folder since the last backup. Since it only deals with the changes, the whole backup process takes just a few moments a week. That is, of coarse, after you do the first backup (which understandably takes some time).

Here’s the link.

I have been using this utility for quite some time and it has been 100% reliable.