A friend of mine wants to back up 8 years worth of documents and files from his work computer, but filter out all pictures and videos. Is there a utility out there that would help with this? There are thousands of files in there, and going by hand would take far too long. I’m guessing something that asks, “copy all files except the following filetypes:” would be perfect.
You can set up a Mozy account and select which folders to backup. They also may let you specify filetypes.
He’s just going to get an external harddrive to do this, as I’m not sure he has admin rights to his computer.
If he just wants to back up the computer to a local external drive, many backup programs will let you set up filters. I use Acronis True Image, but there are many programs that allow you to back up a system.
It’s documents on a networked drive, if that matters at all.
If the documents are already on a network drive, aren’t they already being backed up by the IT department?
Windows has an xcopy command that has switches to let you recurse through subdirectories, and excludes whatever extensions you list in a file. Just open a command processor window from the start menu, and type xcopy /? for details. You want the /s and /exclude switches.
Is this a one-time backup, or does he plan on running regular backups?
You’ve been able to do this since “XCOPY” for DOS.
Just open a DOS box (Start - Run - CMD) and type the command XCOPY /? for the list of options.
For example, this would exclude pictures and movies, create file NOTTHIS.TXT and put in a string on each line,
.JPG .MOV .MPG etc.
So a command like XCOPY D:*.* E:\ /S /Y /C /EXCLUDE:C:
otthis.txt
copies … everything on D to E, including subdirectories, does not prompt for “yes” or “no”, carries on if errors (optional), and excludes any filetype listed in C:
otthis.txt
and this has been around since the 80’s.
Not for working from home.
Extremely rarely, I think.
md2000, I’ll forward that on to him.
I don’t understand how that statement (“Not for working from home”) agrees with this statement (“documents on a networked drive”). Either the files are or are not on a networked drive (presumably some sort of RAID array on a server that is, presumably, backed up on a regular basis and, presumably, that backup process has been tested as valid).
I think the OP meant that the guy wants to copy the files for his own use, not back them up for recovery.
Wait, does the friend want to copy thousands of files from the company server and take them home?
If so, I recommend that he have a conversation with his company management about this. They may not want to have their files taken offsite. And even if the company is cool with it, then he can run into issues with maintaining version control. (That is, what happens when there are different versions of files at his home and on the company server?)
Aside from data security and version control problems Dewey Finn mentions, depending on the company’s line of business and the locations they do business with, he could be putting his employer out of compliance with any number of data privacy and breach laws, or customer contracts if the files have any information on third parties.
If he needs to work from home, he should look into getting set up with a VPN connection. Aside from ensuring that he can access all his data, he should be able to access other corporate resources as well. I’d be surprised if his employer doesn’t have VPN, since they require data to be saved on a network server.
At work, the documents are on the I: drive - which is part of the intraoffice network. When he goes home, he no longer has access to the intraoffice network and the I: drive. Hope that clears it up.
That’s what a VPN is for. He should have a talk with the company’s IT people about how to set that up.
Yikes. I’ll let him know what the concerns are. I highly doubt they utilize a document manager to deal with version control and such, but there’s a very good chance he has no idea what any of the policies are. Thanks all.
The best option I can think of (and highly recommend) is Acronis True Image at www.acronis.com . You can choose to exclude specific file extensions (e.g. .jpg, .mpg, ,mov, etc) when you create a backup.
Is that you, Bradley Manning? :eek: