Beacon Camera Club

PDF's of the various powerpoint and other presentations that are made during the season will be posted here. Please note that the PDF's don't allow showing of the various animations in the presentations, but the sense of what's being said is still there (hopefully!).

This is the content of the simple backup batch file mentioned in one or two of the talks.

c:\windows\system32\xcopy "c:\photographs\*.*" "d:\photographs\" /e/r/y/d/c/k > "c:\logphotos.txt"

How does this work......?

xcopy is a Really Old MS-DOS copy program that has many powerful features and is still included as part of current Windows systems. It hides in the C:windows/system32 directory. It runs under a 'command prompt' (start button/all programs/accessories) - i.e. it's not a Windows program.

c:\photographs\*.* is the source location of your photograph image files. Replace c:\photographs\ with your source drive letter and path appropriate to your system. Keep the *.* as this defines 'all files', or you can change it to - say - *.CR2 to copy only (canon) raw files, or *.psd, etc..

d:\photographs\ is the place that you wish the backups to be put. Replace the d:\photographs\ with your backup drive letter and path as appropriate

/e/r/y/d/c/k is a set of 'switches' which define the action of the xcopy program - do not change these!

> c:\logphotos.txt outputs the messages from the xcopy program to a text file, so it lists the actions carried out - all the files copied this session

Copy the the command line above by wipe-selecting with the mouse, type ctrl-C, then move to an empty new file in notepad, type ctrl-V then edit and save it. Rename its file extension to .bat (notepad will always add '.txt' to anything you enter in the 'save ' dialogue box!) and perhaps call the whole thing backup.bat. However, if you don't do a cut and paste and insist upon typing the whole thing, don't omit the spaces!!

Now, if you open a command prompt window and type "backup" (without the quotes!) the batch file will begin copying files. At the copying destination it will
...create any directories that don't exist in the same structure as the source directoies
...copy any file to its destination in the correct directory ONLY if it has changed since the last backup or is a new file
...NOT replicate any deletions - so files previously copied that you have since deleted on your main drive will still be there

You can run this using a timed task schedule overnight if you really want to get clever!

Please be aware that this is not the be-all and end-all of backup systems but it is reliable! Also, if you rename directories in the source, you will copy another set of the contents of those directories to your backup drive - some destination management is also necessary!