I run Windows XP Pro. I had good success with FAT32 and Windows 98SE, using the XCOPY32 command and .bat files to copy all data volumes downstream, with multiple drives as follows: Drive F: to G:, drive e: to f:, drive d: to e: and finally, a conditional copy of only the data portion of drive C: to D:. If you do this daily, then D: is current, E: is 1 day back, F: is 2 days back, G: is 3 days back and so forth. In this manner I cascaded backups of a rather intricate file system over 3 networked PCs with cheap similar 80 GB drives some 18 levels deep, all fast and on hard drives.
I am now trying to replicate this in XP Pro with the XCOPY command, which has literally the exact same syntax as the former XCOPY32 command. But I must have been badly advised or overlooked something, because when I create a primary partition on a mere data drive and copy a lot of data to it, it becomes extremely slow to open in Windows Exporer. Even a Western Digital 150 GB 10,000 RPM Raptor, one of the fastest drives around, takes 23 seconds to open about 65 GB of data of a couple of hundred folders containing some 150,000 data files.
I am using the syntax
xcopy D:\ E:\ /c /e /f /h /r /s
for when the drive is new and empty, and then
xcopy D:\ E:\ /d /s /e /c /f /h /r /y
once something has been written to it already. I like XCOPY, because it is CUMULATIVE, i.e., it never erases anything as is constantly being done on the C:drive, where all the daily work takes place. Commercial backup systems make drives equal and erase what has been erased on the C: drive down the line & I had bad experience with them and do not trust them like XCOPY.
I think, I made a mistake by partitioning the NTFS copy drives as PRIMARY Partitions, because now there is System Volume Information on them, a file that I cannot even open as Administrator. I am in the process of wiping it all, re-partitioning it all as Extended Partitions ONLY, then I intend to use the EXCLUDE option under XCOPY and exclude the RECYCLED and volume information files explicitly from the list and do so permanently all the way down that cascaded list of backups.
I realize that these are very basic questions, but I want to know what I am doing and whether XCOPY under XP Pro has the same utility and reliabilityas XCOPY32 had under Windows 98SE, which did not lose a single file when used in the above described manner in a decade of heavy daily use.
Am I on the right track, or is there a tweaking trick in XP to turn off swapping or something, so that large volumes open promptly? In general, what can be done to optimize such an XCOPY based backup solution? Note: I have no data to be used by any application on the D: drive. My D: drive is already the first pure backup drive, all data and all apps reside on my C: drive, which is an ultra-fast Samsung SSD (Solid State Disk), which is about 40 times faster than my WD Raptors and my machine is very fast overall with 4 GB Mushkin DDR2 800, ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe, dual-core Athlon 64 X2 etc. None of this, however, helps with making these backup volumes open faster. Also, once the backup voumes have been opened once, then they open instantly the next time, hence, there is something going on between XP and those NTFS drives, because the old FAT32 SATA drives, coming still from Windows 98SE, open very fast by comparison (only about 3-4 seconds vs. 24 seconds for the NTFS backup drive). What am I doing wrong here and how can that speed be optimized?
Thank you very much in advance.
Sincerely,
Bernard
