I wanted to use Robocopy, to backup a directory on a Windows Server 2022 system to an external USB drive attached to the server every weekday. The server is at a company where employees don't usually work on files at the office on weekends and I create a weekly backup archive on weekends using a different backup method. I opted to use Robocopy since it is a free command-line utility for replicating files and directories that is provided by Microsoft with current Windows operating systems. The directory I want to backup is D:\ACCI and I want to create the backup on the external E:\ drive in the existing directory E:\ACI\Backups\ACCI. I want that backup directory to always mirror the source directory, so any files added during the day should be added to the backup directory when the Robocopy command runs and any files that are deleted from the source directory during the day should be deleted from the backup directory when the Robocopy command runs. I.e., the backup directory should mirror the source directory, so I use Robocopy's
/MIR option. The source directory is a directory shared over
the local area network (LAN) and it is possible that an employee may leave
for the day with one or more files in the shared folder on the server still
open. I don't want Robocopy to wait and try again to backup an open file since
the script will be running at night at a time employees aren't likely to be
still working and so any file that is locked because it is still open will
likely remain open until at least the the next day when employees resume
work. So I use the /W:0 option to tell Robocopy to
immediately retry to backup a file if it encounters a problem (by default
it will wait 30 seconds and try again) and the /R:1 option to tell
Robocopy to only retry backing up a file once rather than try repeatedly
(it will try 1 million times by default). I want to record all output of the
Robocopy daily backups in E:\ACI\Backups\RoboCopyBackup.log so I
place that output path and filename after >> which will
append the daily output to that file—if you just use one greater than sign
rather than two, the file will be overwritten each time the Robocopy command
runs. So I have the following Robocopy command, which I placed in a file
I created with Windows
Notepad named Robocopy_Daily_Mirror.bat (when you are
saving a batch file
in notepad change "save as type" from "Text Documents (*.txt)" to "All Files"):
robocopy D:\ACCI E:\ACI\Backups\ACCI /MIR /W:0 /R:1 >> E:\ACI\Backups\RoboCopyBackup.log
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