Before Starting
This guide is meant to be used for creating automatic backup by using Vista's own utility software that is included in Vista; the program is called Robocopy. I will also assume you know how to do some simple things like finding the Control Panel. The control panel needs to be in classic view, you can always change it back afterwards.
The First Step
Before we get started you should take some notice about three things:
- The location of the folder you want to backup
- The location where you want the backup being done.
- Administrative rights for the account
Now you are ready to get started with it. Go to your Control Panel, inside the control panel you should have a icon called Administrativ Tools; click on that icon and you will be lead to a new page. Now you have a new page with different icons in it; look for an icon called Task Scheduler and click on it.
Inside Task Scheduler
Time to teach you how to create a task for the time scheduler.
On the tab you will find four different actions you can do: File, Action, View and Help. Click on the Action after that you will receive a drop down menu with several options: Create a basic task, Create a Task, Import a Task etc. You want to create a Task, so you click on that.
Alternate way to create a task is to look at the right side of the window and there should be a Title called Task Scheduler Library where you can directly click on create Task.
Now you will be presented with different options under five different tabs. I will explain in detail what you need to do in each tab.
General
Choose a name for the task you are wanting to create, any name is fine as long as you know what it is. The same goes for the description in which you might want to add an description what it does. Now to the security options; for the task you are creating, you need to choose a account that it will use for running it any account will do fine as long as it will have all the rights to access the files you want to backup. Do you want the task to be run only when the user is logged in, or always? Then you have the choice to check the box for it to run with the highest privileges.
Triggers
This is rather self explaining; here you create the triggers that will trigger the backup; for example for a backup it would be good to have it run daily at a sepecific time. Just pus the New button and then you will be able to create triggers that will trigger the backup. Time is not the only one you can choose but also you can trigger it to run at log in, log out etc. Just look around and decide which is the best for your needs. It is wise to create several differnt triggers in case the computer is shut down when it is supposed to run the backup routine or something else happens.
Actions: In here we can configure the action of this task, in our case we want the robocopy to run periodacally.
As an Action you need to choose Start a program. The name of the program is robocopy write under Program/script.
Now we need to use the Add arguments to do what we want. "X:Tiedostot" "C:BackupTiedostot" /E /DCOPY:T is what is written in the picture, I will use it to explain what to do; first Location("X:Tiedostot") is the origanal location of the files you want to copy, so write the location of the folder you want to backup here; the second Location ("C:BackupTiedostot") is the location you want the date to be coppied in. /E /DCOPY:T is a command for robocopy and it tells the program to copy everything that has changed; however, the files that have been deleted from the original location will not be deleted from the backup location it only adds files that do not exist in the backup folder, or files that have changed since the last backup.
It is possible to make several different locations for a file to be copied into; all you need to do is follow the steps above for as many folders as you want to by just creating one and then create as many new ones as you need. As you can see, I have four different folders being backupped each day through one single task.
Conditions
You will not have a real need to change anything under this section. You can leave everything under here on default.
Settings
There is only one change you might want to do under settings is to allow the restart of the task in case it fails for some strange reason. After that push OK.
Time to see if works.
The time has come to see if the program works the way it is supposed to.
Now you should have an item or more on the list. If you look at the picture you can see the Task Robocopy high lighted and the mouse over the Run option. To see if it works, you just need to have the task run once; the first time the task runs it takes a while as it has to copy everything; the times after the first time will be a lot faster, depending how much has changed in the folder.
Finished
You have now successfully finish creating a automated backup task with the task scheduler and robocopy. You should check every once in a while that the task has been running without errors to make sure that there were no problems at all.
