Can Windows 7 Home Premium incrementally backup all my files on my disks to a single external hard drive?

Question

Hi Here's what I want to do.

1. I have 6 * 2TB drives connected to my motherboard for storing ONLY media files (music, video, etc.)
2. I want to backup all my files as they grow to an external 2TB drive from these 6 drives.
3. Once my data amounts to 2TB, I want to plug in another 2TB external drive to which new data is backed up to
4. My old 2TB external drive will just get retired until it is needed.
5. If I lose one of my internal 2TB drives, I want to rebuild it from the data stored from 1 or more of my external drives. I may have to perform the rebuild in stages as I might be only able to connect one external drive at a time.
6. Backups should be incremental

Can Windows 7 do this? In fact, can anything do this?

I have a bad feeling that if I want simple backups of my data, I have to buy 6 external 2TB drives and connect them to my PC and keep a single 1:1 backup relationship between Master & Destination....

Someone tell me there is a better way!!

Answer 1

Microsoft's Robust File Copy tool ("robocopy") would be a good tool for syncing data with your backup drives. It is a command line tool, and you could create a batch file yourself for your backup needs, or you could use the RoboCopy GUI utility to create some batch files for you.

Example of use:

robocopy C:\data E:\data /MIR /Z

This command will initially copy ALL of the contents of c:\data to e:\data. After the first copy, it will only copy changes to files or new files - it essentially mirrors the drives. Keep in mind that using /MIR will delete files on the backup drive if they've been deleted on the source drive, so only use that command if you want deletes copied in addition to new files.

To automate this, create a batch file or set up a Scheduled Task in Windows and put the command in there. Make sure that the user you run the scheduled task under has permission to read all of the files you are backing up.