There are many backup Solutions available; both on the Cloud (Dropbox for lite users; Carbonite for heavy users) and Hardware Based (NAS Storage; Sonicwall CDP)
But If you are an individual or a small office and have no more money than an external hard drive to spend on; a simple XCOPY backup solution is what will get you through
- Open a Notepad and add commands as below
- XCOPY /e/c/y/v/d <source directory> <target directory>
- You may add as many XCOPY commands as you would like considering the directories that need to be backed up
- An effective XCOPY backup command when run should be error free; without user prompt and incremental. You should use the appropriate syntax to achive this. You may refer to URL for syntax details
- Once done save the text file as <filename>.bat
- If its one time backup you want; you may run the file just once.
- If its a scheduled backup; use the default windows Task Scheduler (taskschd.msc) to setup a periodic backup schedule