I've been needing to run an incremental backup of my main system for a while now, but since then I've moved a lot of things around to conserve space on my 120GB SSD that has Windows 8.1 installed on it. I do a lot of digital media stuff so I have Adobe and AutoDesk programs installed as well as a few games on the SSD, and whatever games that I can't fit on the SDD I have installed to my 1TB Gamma (G:) drive. I've also moved my documents folders and my %appdata% folder to the Gamma drive. I know that the Windows wants to image all drives that use system files, but the total amount of data that affects Windows' operation is only 15GB on my Gamma drive. Windows wants to image the entire 773GB of data which I don't want it to. I don't have a destination drive big enough for that! I have a 1TB WD Elements external drive I've been using to keep my regular backup on, it already has 596GB of data on that which I've copied to my Gamma drive as a backup of itself, so I don't want to back up the backup I have. I only want to pick specific system folders on the Gamma drive to back up, not the whole drive. Is this possible?
It is. You can't use windows backup though. You either have to have specific program that supports folder backup, or write a simple batch file using Robocopy/xcopy. I will show you a sample of robocopy.
Some quick tips, the first part is the source then the next is the destination. ALSO MAKE SURE YOU PUT QUOTATIONS AROUND THE SOURCE AND THE DESTINATION. The /COPYALL is self explanatory, /E all sub directories as well. /r:1 read one time /w:1 wait one second before trying again it read is set to more than one.
This will create the folders on your backup drive and then put the contents in those folders. So you would open notepad. Type your commands, put an enter[return] after each one and go to save as. Change the file type to all and name something like backupscript.bat and save it where ever you wish. Then go to where it was saved, and right click and run as admin. A black box will appear and you will see the progress.
Thanks. It worked, but I'm wanting to do more than just copy my data. I use Windows' System Image util to backup the exact state that Windows is currently in, so if something like corrupt registry happens I can just flash back to one of my images. I got it working by cramming the appdata and desktop location back on the SSD. My system image size went from 773GB to 73GB.
