Backing up all pictures from a harddrive

Question

My uncle gave me a harddrive to recover from. The harddrive is perfectly intact and no problems with it. I plugged it in and XP allowed me to go in using My Computer.

Now the thing is the data is spread out on this disk. What I want to do is go through the entire disk (E:) and copy all images, documents and pdfs to my local harddrive (so I can burn them to a dvd).

This is XP so I dont have powershell, but maybe a batch script that can do it?

Answer 1

You should be able to use XCopy to copy your files to a new drive. The following should work, but be sure to test it on some sample data first:

xcopy /s e:\*.pdf d:\

The above will recursively copy all pdf files from your e drive to your d drive. Change the source (e) and destination (d) as needed.

I'm not sure how to include all file types, so you may need to run the script multiple times and change the file type for each run.

Check the XCopy documentation for other switches you may need.

Answer 2

What about that simple cmd xcopy /S/C/H/I/E/R/Y/D e: c:\backup_of_e?

That should go through the entire disk (E:) and copy all images, documents and pdfs to your local harddrive c:

Answer 3

I think a simple xcopy approach will also duplicate the folder structure of the source drive (which I would not want in this case). To loop through all folders and subfolders and copy files to one specified folder without subdirectories try this (add files types to your liking):

C:\>for /R E:\ %G IN (*.jpg, *.doc) DO xcopy "%G" C:\rescuedfiles\