Copying One Drive to Another To Back Up Hoster Files

[swaseysd]

James:

If I understand you correctly, it appears you're using an imaging tool to copy files from your C Drive to your D Drive. Imaging tools copy not only the data files but the operating system files as well.

I believe that what is happening with you is that each time you use the imaging application to copy from C to D, it places a new copy of the operating system on your PC and the BIOS sees this when you boot, giving you the choice of which operating system to boot.

If you're concerned simply with backing up your Hoster files, why not do just a straight copy? I have my main Hoster files on an external USB 180-GB drive and my backup Hoster files on an external USB 120-GB drive. I'm only using about 75 GB of disk space for my Hoster files so I have more than enough room to backup my files for a while yet. One external drive is my E Drive and the other is my F Drive. I simply go to my E Drive, select all the Hoster files, select Copy To Folder from the edit menu, and then select the destination folder on my F Drive.

That process works fine for the first time you do the backup. For future backups, you'd only want to copy the newer files from the source drive to the destination drive. For that, simply use the XCOPY command. Here's how.

Go to a command (DOS) prompt and change directory to the source Hoster files. In my case, my source directory is a directory called Karaoke on my E Drive, i.e. E:\Karaoke. While in the source directory, type XCOPY *.* F:\Karaoke /D

The /D parameter copies all files changed on or after the date specified. If no date is specified, it will copy only those files whose source date is newer than the destinatiion date. This saves time because only the files added or changed in the source directory will be copied to the destination directory.

Hope this helps.

Steve D. Swasey
Dayton, OH