vingfel (28 Jun, 2005 21:45):
I want, sometime, to backup the data hard drive on another hard drive.
The idea was to use a simple xcopy.
. . .
Is there another way to update the files on the target drive?
. . .
I like the XCOPY idea becasue if I delete a file in the X: drive, then the copy in the Y: drive is not deleted. I keepall, anfd update it.
There is a problem with XCOPY -- my testing showed that it won't copy locked files, thus you may not get a usable backup.
Use dSync which is a synchronization program.
Here is an example of a file that XCOPY won't copy:
[M:\]xcopy G:\OS2\HELP\deter___.DB /h/o/t/s/e/r/v
Source files are being read...
SYS1186: XCOPY cannot access the source file.
G:\OS2\HELP\deter___.DB
0 file(s) copied.
[M:\]
dSync will copy the above file without problem.
On my main machine I have a dedicated drive with two backup partitions, and I alternate my backups so I always have two recent backups. Each drive which I back up goes into a directory, so for example my C: backup goes into M:\C\ today and N:\C\ tomorrow.
dSync will run much faster than XCOPY because it is a synchronizer. It only copies files which have changed (datetime stamp or filesize).
dSync *will* delete files from the backup which no longer exist on the source drive, so if you delete or rename a file the backup will not have"ghost" files on it. You said you wanted the ghost files so this may be a problem. Multiple backups might be a solution.
My reference for dSync is
http://zuko.mitm.ru/files/dsync016z.zip
http://zuko.mitm.ru/soft/dsync_en.html
http://zuko.mitm.ru/soft/dsync_history
although the site won't ping at the moment (nslookup finds it, perhaps the machine is off).
- Peter