My laptop isn’t booting, so I’m running a Windows ISO off a DVD and attempting to backup some files to an external hard drive plugged into the USB via Command Prompt.
With command prompt I can enter folders and copy the individual files within them to my hard drive using the robocopy command.
(E.g ‘C:\Users\Downloads robocopy E:).
However I want to copy an entire directory such as ‘C:\Program Files (x86)’ including all of the (unzipped) sub folders etc.
I’ve tried using xcopy like this:
‘C\program files (x86)\ E:\ /s /e /h /i /c /y’
& like this:
‘C:\program files (x86)\ E:\’.
But each time command prompt returns the message ‘Invalid number of parameters’.
Any idea on how I could copy these directories?
All help would be much appreciated! Thank you!
Best Answer
Here's the syntax that you need for Robocopy if you want to specify a particular source directory.
You would need to run it multiple times in order to back up multiple source folders:
robocopy /e c:\users\mguillaume\downloads "e:\laptop backup"
/e
include subfolders and Empty subfolders/s
include Subfolders (but skip empty subfolders)You don't want to use the
/s
and/e
switches together; they conflict. Pick one! I personally prefer to include empty subfolders, so/e
is my go-to. The way I see it, completely preserving your existing folder structure, including empty folders, may help you to organize your data in future.Paths containing one or more spaces must be enclosed within double quotation marks. In your example, I noticed that your paths containing spaces were missing their quotation marks.
There's no need to use capital letters. Nothing here is case sensitive anyway. Feel free to use them if you want though.
Alternatively, you could copy the entire C drive and simply exclude any directories and files that you don't want. I like to use Robocopy this way, as you can back up everything you want in one shot!
That would look something like this:
/xd
eXclude Directories/xf
eXclude Files/r:0
run with zero Retries. I always use this so Robocopy doesn't get stuck on locked files. You will see if anything was skipped in the summary anyway.