Synctoy Automatic Backup

By | January 7, 2015

“Backing up is easy, the hard part is remembering to do it” – a wise man

With that in mind this post shows you how to automatically backup your files on your windows computer.

For information on backing up a linux computer checkout this post on rsync.

Microsoft Synctoy

There are no doubt scores of different synchronising and backup programs for windows, but the best I’ve found is synctoy. It’s made by microsoft, and works well.

Get synctoy here.

Using it is simple enough. You just pick the source and target directories and run it.

There are different modes you can run your synchronisation in. For backup purposes I recommend setting your folder pairs to “Contribute” which prevents your local deletions from propagating through to your backup. If you’re really sure you don’t want a file, just delete both the local and backup versions.

Automatic Backup With Synctoy

Synctoy becomes really powerful if you use it to automate your backups.

We do this by using the task scheduler.

There’s a good guide to doing this here.

Network Drives

If you’re lucky enough to have a mapped network drive to back your work up to, then you need to be a bit more clever.

The windows task scheduler doesn’t know about your local drive names (like C:\, Z:\, etc.). Instead you need to use the ‘UNC‘ path: something like “\\host\directoryname“.

You can find the unc path for all your mapped network drives by running

net use

at the command line.

Use the entry under the Remote heading for the drive you would like to backup to.