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[nickharambee]

i am running 2 external hard drives with my laptop.  on disk 1 i have all of the music that i have ripped from my cd collection.  disk 2 is a back up of disk 1 ( i am selling original cds and thus need a back up).  i use MC9 as my media library, and my os is windows xp.  basically, when i have added new tracks to my music folders on disk 1 i would like to be able to update disk 2, without having to recopy all of the folders on disk 1 (we are talking over 100 GB of ape files which would take many hours).  the only option i can find at present in xp is to copy all of the files, replacing those that already exist. i do not want to have to locate all of the new files/folders on disk 1 and individually copy them, as this could take a long time, and the files would be hard to find.  so, is there a way of updating my back up on disk 2, so that when i copy my music from disk 1 the copying process will skip over tracks already on disk 2 and simply copy the new tracks from disk 1 (in a similar way that MC9 updates the media library when importing new media)?

i hope this is clear, thanks, nick.

[mindracing]

I can thourougly recommend Second Copy 2000 from www.centered.com.

It is the best disc to disc back-up I've come across.

The trial lasts 30 days. After that you can still use it but can't add any more back-up profiles. For what you need it sounds like the trial will be enough, giving you 30 days to work out your profiles and then use it for free.

P.S. I have no commercial interest in this!

[bvm]

If you don't mind using the Command Prompt, something like

xcopy c:\music d:\musicbackup /y /d /k /r /i

does exactly what you're asking.

[KingSparta]

/y = Suppresses prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an
               existing destination file.
/d = If no date is given, copies only those files whose
               source time is newer than the destination time.
/k = Copies attributes. Normal Xcopy will reset read-only attributes.
/r = Overwrites read-only files.
/i =   If destination does not exist and copying more than one file,
        assumes that destination must be a directory.

[bvm]

It occurs to me that my answer wasn't exactly what you were asking for, since it doesn't delete files from your backup directory that have been removed (or renamed) from your source.  I don't see any xcopy option to do that (though you could use it afterwards in reverse with the /l switch to tell you what files would need to be deleted: xcopy d:\musicbackup c:\music /d /l).

I long ago wrote myself a perl script to get around this shortcoming, but it's such a simple operation I can't believe there aren't decent freeware solutions out there that don't require you have perl installed  .  A brief google search showed me one called xcopy (http://www.xxcopy.com/); I haven't tried it, but perhaps other readers know about it or superior alternatives.

[hit_ny]

i use norton Ghost for backups, it has a clone disk feature. Its not free but its useful for backup of your sytem drives as well.

Since you are talking about external drives, i'm not sure how long it would take to do a disk clone, but internal drives 120GB is cloned in 1-2 hrs.

You would not need to worry bout which folders were updated or not, just clone the whole thing. ITs a sector by sector copy. So if you did this on a monthly basis, it could work.

[Monkeyboy]

I'd recommend backup magic. I use it to back up to my server and I don't want to copy 60 gigs everytime.
This program first scans the host and destination folders and matches them to your criteria then selects them for copy. Very nice