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I have a backup of the documents, pictures and videos folders on a large external USB drive which took many hours to create. - Hey, even cloud services can lose files, as I found out to my cost 😏

I now have new files and modified copies of others which I need to copy to the backup USB drive.

Is there a quicker way to update ("sync") the backup with the new and modified files in Windows 10 without select all > copy to USB then waiting hours for the PC to ask if I want to overwrite the modified duplicates once it has gone through the files?

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  • What O.S. are you using? My favorite tools are the ones mentioned by @Madhubala in their answer: rsync for Linux and Robocopy for Windows. Both involve some scripting. For Windows there was once a tool by Microsoft called SyncToy that worked very well but does not seem to be supported by Microsoft anymore.
    – StarCat
    Commented Aug 21, 2021 at 6:08
  • Oops @StarCat sorry, it's Windows 10. I'll edit that into the question now
    – Chris Rogers
    Commented Aug 21, 2021 at 6:09

1 Answer 1

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you can try using

  1. rsync

--ignore-existing

skip updating files that exist on receiver

-b, --backup

With this option, preexisting destination files are renamed as each file is transferred or deleted. You can control where the backup file goes and what (if any) suffix gets appended using the --backup-dir and --suffix options

  1. robocopy

/xo:

Excludes older files - if destination file exists and is the same date or newer than the source - don't bother to overwrite it.

  1. For gui use freefilesync
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  • You mentioned using /xo (exclude older files) but would I need /im (include modified files)? docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/…
    – Chris Rogers
    Commented Aug 21, 2021 at 6:14
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    @ChrisRogers you can, but the problem with "modified" is that you may have modified the file on both sides, thus creating two separate branches of the files. If you're not concerned about data loss then including modified files is the way to go.
    – shawn
    Commented Aug 21, 2021 at 8:08

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