04-11-11, 09:20 AM
I use robocopy (Robust Copy) to backup to my external drive, it's included with vista so you cold give it a try and see if it works any better. It's a command line tool so you'l need to create a batch file to run it (rename a text file to .bat instead of .txt) and keep it on the root of your backup drive so you can run it whenever or schedule a regular task in windows if your NAS drive is always available. It's a direct copy so you dont have to use any software to restore files the tradeoff is that the files arn't compressed. The second time you run it, it will just backup the new files / folders or those that have changed rather than copying everything again.
Robocopy C:\ E:\RoboBackup /E /Z /R:2 /W:2 /LOG:E:\RoboBackup\log.txt /TEE
This will copy the contents of drive C:\ to a RoboBackup folder on drive E:\. The /E switch tells it that you want to copy everything including empty folders, the /Z switch is important if your storage is connected to the network (NAS) rather than USB or E-SATA, the /R:2 and /W:2 switches specify the number of times robocopy should try to read or write a file before passing on to the next one (in this case two times), the /LOG switch is the location that the event log should be created (lists files not copied etc) in this case a log.txt file in the directory where our backups live, the /TEE switch shows the results on-screen as well as in the log file. I have 3 logical drives where I store my documents, music and photos so I have 3 seperate lines in my batch file one for each drive and pointing do a different destination folder for each one.
Have a look here for more options but the above should work fine if you amend the relevent drives and folders - http://ss64.com/nt/robocopy.html
Robocopy C:\ E:\RoboBackup /E /Z /R:2 /W:2 /LOG:E:\RoboBackup\log.txt /TEE
This will copy the contents of drive C:\ to a RoboBackup folder on drive E:\. The /E switch tells it that you want to copy everything including empty folders, the /Z switch is important if your storage is connected to the network (NAS) rather than USB or E-SATA, the /R:2 and /W:2 switches specify the number of times robocopy should try to read or write a file before passing on to the next one (in this case two times), the /LOG switch is the location that the event log should be created (lists files not copied etc) in this case a log.txt file in the directory where our backups live, the /TEE switch shows the results on-screen as well as in the log file. I have 3 logical drives where I store my documents, music and photos so I have 3 seperate lines in my batch file one for each drive and pointing do a different destination folder for each one.
Have a look here for more options but the above should work fine if you amend the relevent drives and folders - http://ss64.com/nt/robocopy.html