Creating An Automated Backup Solution For A Home Network Using VBScript And Robocopy (Part II)

Basically just a follow up here. I wanted to use the script in Part 1, with some backup hardware and Windows Scheduler to automate this task.

I wanted to use something that was easy to swap media out and had a large capacity. With the price of hard drives these days, it seemed reasonable that I use something that used a standard SATA internal hard drive. After some research, I decided upon a

NexStar Hard Drive Dock

. 

I picked one up for under $40 and with a 1TB SATA drive, it seemed like a great addition to my backup solution.

Windows Scheduler

Now we need some way to kick of the script. To set the script from the previous post to run automatically on a schedule, I used a utility found in Windows called “Windows Scheduler” You can find this tool under Control Panel. Here’s a picture of what it looks like with this job already setup:

As you can see the job is named “Network Backup” and setup to run once every day at 7:17 PM. I set it up like this since I was unsure of when or if the computers being backed up would be turned on and available or not. I figured there was a pretty good chance that at least once a week, it would get lucky and backup the files on each computer. If you read the previous post, you’ll remember that I only created new backup folders for each week of the month. This will cause the backup files to be placed in the same folder for one week, and then switch to the next folder the following week. That way, I’ll be have the option to go back at least 4 weeks to get a copy of some file or set of files.

Here’s how Windows Scheduler looks with this job setup:

And here is the same window but viewing the schedule information:

With a standard hard drive in the dock, here’s what it looks like:

With the external SATA (eSATA) cable hooked up, this can write files as fast as my 100mb network can feed it.