Robocopy questions...............!

[Kyle]

I have read several post on here baout RoboCopy and if i am perfectly honest i have never heard of it.

I have read the post about what users to to do their back ups. I noticed quite a few use NTbackup but tohters use Robo Copy.


My questions is...............if i need to back up 70gb of Home Directories is RoboCopy quicker than NT Backup?

We are trying to juggle around our back up procedures becasue of time issues and wondered if RoboCopy was quicker.

[ChrisH]

I use both NTBackup and robocopy.

I use NTBackup for the system drives and Robocopy for home directories and network apps etc.

The first time that my script runs it take a long time to copy all the user area stuff. After this it just copies the files that have changed so very little. So effectively you are syncing your data in 2 locations.

The only problem with this is if you need an earlier version from a backup. I use volume shadow copy to retrieve previous versions but if you lose a disk and do a full restore you might not have this information. Just something to consider. I currently havent made provision for this but its not really that much of a problem for me.

[Kyle]

How long do you think it would take to copy 70gb the first time?

[ChrisH]

Depends where your copying it to. It will take as long as it takes for you to copy manually whether it be disk to disk or over the network to another box. The only difference will be that robocopy will retry on failure and has some other nice features you can set.