Bill D -

I "segregate" the files I need to back up, on my own system drive in a folder C:\BUP\, on one permanently connected drive K:\, and (so far as I can get cooperation to do so) in a shared folder on each of the other computers on our LAN.

Each of the shared folders not directly connected to my machine is mapped as a drive on my local machine.

When I plug an external USB drive into my machine it appears as a new drive, perhaps M:\.

At a command prompt, M:\ switches me to the backup drive.

CD CBUP puts me in the folder M:\CBUP\ folder where I want to backup files from C:\BUP\

The simple command (including the location shown at the command prompt - M:\CBUP>):

M:\CBUP>XCOPY C:\BUP\*.* /s /d /c

does exactly what your backup program does.

The /s tells it to copy everything in subfolders in the source.

The /d tells it to copy only things that are newer on the source than in the existing target folder.

The /c tells it to "continue on error" so that if it hits one of those rare "copy protected" files it skips that one and continues copying. (Most external drives have a "System Volume Information" folder that can't be copied easily, and the /c lets the process skip over those, and one of my "other users" has one !$@#! mpc file that's DRM protected so once a backup copy has been made it blocks any further copying.

Windows, at least since XP and probably Win2K, also has a command prompt thing called "ROBOCOPY" (for Robust Copy) that's apparently even more "powerful" than XCOPY but it requires "scripting" for some things that XCOPY can do with switches, and the script format/requirements are only vaguely described in documentation that I've found thus far. I haven't had a spare empty backup hard drive to test it on, so I haven't played with it.

The "backup" in Vista Business, Premium, and Multimedia versions includes a "synchronize" that offers the ability to automatically keep two drives "identical." (It's not in Home versions.) This lets you automatically remove files from the backup if they've been deleted on the source; but it opens the possibility that a file accidentally deleted (or corrupted) on one drive will be deleted from both. Microsoft's only instructions on backup - and especially on sync - are limited to "I am the Lord thy Microsoft. Trust me." and I'm not quite that true a believer, especially since the two separate prior cases where Microsoft backups were true "backups to WOM."

John