Simple Backup

Stayed up until 4am setting up my external HDD (hard drive) and running backups. I have two 10 TB HDDs by different manufacturers which I use to backup 1) all raw photos, and 2) Dropbox. 

Last year was my first time using robocopy, and it worked great! Especially when synchronizing the changing directories and files of Dropbox. In Dropbox, I'll move files from Camera Uploads/ into specified YYYY/MM/ folders for example; RC will make those changes. However, last year I didn't take good notes, so I had to relearn how to use the command. It's a simple CLI/PowerShell command, but since the Dropbox backup is destructive, I wanted test runs to verify everything is correct; especially specifying which drive is source, and which is destination. I took better notes this year, so hopefully it's much easier when I do this again in about 6 months time. Here's the doc in case anyone is interested.

Comments

  1. Matt MMay 12, 2026, 1:44:00 PM

    That's a cool process. I like how you have it automated. For years I've been using SuperDuper to clone my drives. It uses a smart search to find which files/folders have been updated. And it will copy only those.

    Now, SuperDuper won't do all this cool renaming of folders. But my workflow doesn't do the renaming when I clone my drives. Anytime I put photos on my computer from my phone or camera, I use Adobe Lightroom. It automatically takes care of renaming all my files as "photo-YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS" and folders for each day YYYY-MM-DD within a folder for the month YYYY-MM, which is within a folder for the year YYYY.

    But thanks for sharing your script! That's cool that you posted it online for others to use.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Andre AlforqueMay 16, 2026, 12:46:00 PM

      I have the same process for photos exported from Adobe Lightroom! I include camera make and model, and lens on the file name.

      For RAW images, they remain with their camera file names. I create a folder with date and event when copying onto the internal SSD for processing. My external hard drives are only used to backup twice a year; this in hopes of extending the longevity of the drive. And I'll replace the hard drive every 5 years or so; sometimes because I need a larger drive and bigger sizes are available.

      On Dropbox for a long time I was using ExifTool to rename files in a similar format with datetime, and adding the phone make and model. I stopped as it was getting tedious, and all that info is in the metadata anyways.

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