That was different from my COLDSTORAGE (E) drive. The DATA drive contained materials that were in active use, at least in the sense that I would intermittently rename, rearrange, edit, delete, or otherwise tinker with them. Each such folder would contain a full copy of all files and folders on my DATA (D) drive. My preferred solution was to have a separate backup folder for every hour of the day, numbered from 00 (i.e., midnight) through 23 (i.e., 11 PM). A relatively complex solution would create a ZIP in the source drive, move that to the target drive, and then unzip it there (see also SuperUser). Note: combining the backup into a single compressed file could be much faster than file-by-file copying if the source folders contained large numbers of files (e.g., 10K+ per folder). So if I wanted to know whether there was an earlier backup of MyFile.doc, I couldn’t use my preferred Everything file finder to immediately locate and view all copies I would have to go rooting through those Acronis or Macrium backup files. Moreover, as I recalled, these programs would put all backed-up files into a single compressed file, one per session. I didn’t want to rely on third-party software that might switch from being free to being paid (as had happened with Macrium some years earlier, before they switched back to offering a free version), or that might switch from being good to being semi-fubar, as had happened with Acronis. Instead of a mirroring program like Robocopy, one alternative was to use something like Acronis or Macrium to supplement a full drive backup with differential or incremental backups on a schedule. The question was, how should I proceed? For reasons described here, I chose to use a Robocopy script, shown below. I had a bunch of data files on a Windows 10 desktop computer.
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