Keith Kim’s Blog

Back up using DOS batch

Posted by Keith under Tips

Almost always I make backups of important files, but I still lose up-to-date files.  So automating/scheduling backup is needed.

I do:

• Files are backed up continously using Mozy.
• Image of C drive is created daily onto another HDD.
• Some important files are backed up using SyncBack to another computer.
• For MySQL, I use MySQL Administrator to schedule back up.

Fo sync back, it is easier if a directory is ZIPed up.  So here is a simple batch file:

[sourcecode language=’css’]

@echo off
REM =============
REM back up daily
REM Run by WinXP scheduler
REM =============

REM === Get current date
FOR /F “TOKENS=1* DELIMS= ” %%A IN (’DATE/T’) DO SET CDATE=%%B
FOR /F “TOKENS=1,2 eol=/ DELIMS=/ ” %%A IN (’DATE/T’) DO SET mm=%%B
FOR /F “TOKENS=1,2 DELIMS=/ eol=/” %%A IN (’echo %CDATE%’) DO SET dd=%%B
FOR /F “TOKENS=2,3 DELIMS=/ ” %%A IN (’echo %CDATE%’) DO SET yyyy=%%B
SET date=%yyyy%%mm%%dd%

REM KK-20080829: backing up Palm
zip -r “C:\BACKUP\palm\kkim_%date%.zip” “C:\Program Files\palmOne\kkim”

[/sourcecode]

I got this “date” batch script from the net.  Sorry, don’t remember where I got it.  This works very well, and kudos to who wrote it.

I have cygwin installed and c:\cygwin\bin is in my PATH, thus the ‘zip’ executable is used in the batch file.  And Windows scheduler is used here.  And, SyncBack will pick up the file and put it onto another computer.  Or, the ZIP file can be created on another HDD.