Have Windows? Great. You can easily backup folders or even hard drives with ease then. And the best part? You don’t even need any additional software!

I encountered a situation recently where my computer’s secondary / slave hard drive has began to fail. The signs are obvious: videos played from the hard drive lag or stutter (VLC Player, Media Player Classic, Windows Media Player, etc)…Copying files from the drive takes forever with very inconsistent speeds (it drops a lot)…etc.

So I decided to make a backup of the drive. Dragging and dropping the files from the secondary drive’s partition over to the primary / master drive usually works well, but in the case of a failing drive, or in the case of someone who doesn’t have time to do the entire backup right away, that is not ideal.

The solution? ROBOCOPY.

Open up a notepad document and paste the following lines in:
ROBOCOPY D:\TEST\\ C:\Users\USERNAME\Desktop\SECONDHD\\ /S /R:0 /W:0
pause

Replace “D:\TEST\\” with the location you wish to backup and replace “C:\Users\USERNAME\Desktop\SECONDHD\\” with the location of where these files will be stored.

Save the notepad document as “backup.cmd” and run it! It will now backup all the files in the location specified. If there is a file that cannot be copied, it will SKIP it automatically because of the flags supplied for the robocopy command.

If you exit the backup, or your computer gets turned off during it — then no worries. ROBOCOPY will skip all files it has already successfully copied (it compares file sizes and modification dates) and only copy what’s left. As you can guess, this makes for a wonderful backup utility because of so.

This works on Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Windows 7, Windows Vista, and even Windows XP.