Backup question

[Captain Gadget]

I use Norton Ghost 10.0 to back up my system to a second drive on a weekly basis. This works absolutely fine - on the odd occasion over the last few years when meltdown has occurred, I have always been able to restore the system within about an hour without any issues at all.

However I also feel the need to ensure that any new files (I'm thinking particularly of photos newly downloaded from my camera here, but it would apply equally to documents) in My Documents are backed up daily - so that there is always a way of recovering anything that is too new to be on the most recent system backup. At present I use SmartSync to create a copy of the My Documents folder on the backup drive - but this is getting quite large and the vast majority of its contents are already in the aforementioned Ghost backups anyway (Ghost 10 allows easy recovery of individual files as well as a complete system restore).

What I am looking for is an app (or script?) that carries out two scheduled tasks each night:

1. Sweep the copy of the My Documents folder on the backup drive and delete all files from it with a save date prior to X days ago (I would probably go for 30 days to start with).

2. Scan My Documents on the system drive and incrementally copy all files less than X (30) days old onto the backup drive. I'm happy with a straight copy, no need for compression, encryption, etc.

I reckon that this would save me approx 80GB of space on the backup drive with no loss of data security. Has anyone any ideas?

All the best

Gadget :ok:

[Keef]

Not sure if it's quite what you want, and it's prehistoric in design, but I have a set of batchfiles that copy my key documents, pix, etc to the "backup" external hard drive. They create a new folder each time with a name that includes the date - so I can delete the intermediate ones.

It's optional what "keep" routine you operate, but "last five days, last five Saturdays before that, last five month-ends before that" sort of idea works well.

Windows Task Scheduler is set up to run it. Deleting old files is manual.

Here's the bones of the batchfile format:
@ECHO Keef's Backer-Upper to the external drive...
xcopy C:\Docume~1\Keithj~1\MyDocu~1\*.* S:\MainBU%date:~6,4%%date:~3,2%%date:~0,2%\Doc\*.* /C /D /S /Y
@ECHO All doneThat's easily editable to suit requirements. Not as elegant as the proprietary solutions, but it's worked well for me for a very long time.