Effective Inexpensive Backups – Part 3 of 5

Goal – Incremental backup by the day so we can find the version of the file(s) we prefer.

For this backup we will use xcopy to copy files and folders that have changed since the last incremental backup. This type of backup is useful if you are not sure WHEN the file you are looking for was deleted or damaged. Incremental backups allow you to open the file as it existed yesterday, the day before, two days before, etc. In this example we will save the last ten days. Incremental backups are small as they only include information changed since the last backup.
For the script example, we are interested in two folders:
• Source – \\server\data
• Destination – e:\backup\inc

Here is the example script:

rem ---------------- deletes oldest backup
rd /s/q  e:\backup\inc9
rem ---------------- rename old backups
rename e:\backup\inc8 inc9
rename e:\backup\inc7 inc8
rename e:\backup\inc6 inc7
rename e:\backup\inc5 inc6
rename e:\backup\inc4 inc5
rename e:\backup\inc3 inc4
rename e:\backup\inc2 inc3
rename e:\backup\inc inc2
rem ---------------- copies changed data
xcopy /c/h/s/v/m \\server\data e:\backup\inc