Windows provides very featureful command which is used to copy files can take backups named xcopy
. Xcopy can be used copy files from one partition to other partition or a usb drive. Xcopy also supports incremental backup which create advantages while taking backups. We will look different usage examples of xcopy in this tutorial.
Help
Detailed help about xcopy command can be show with /?
option like below.
$ xcopy /?

Copy Files
One of the most used type of xcopy is providing no option and just copying files from source path to the destination file. In this example we will provide source file named systeminfo.txt
to the Downloads
directory.
$ xcopy systeminfo.txt Downloads

Ignore Errors
While copying files there may some errors related permission, corrupt data, changed data etc. These will create errors and these error will be printed to the terminal by default and these errors can be interrupt the copy operation. These errors can be ignored with /c
option.
$ xcopy /c systeminfo.txt Downloads
Backup Data Using Date and Time Stamp
One of the very useful feature is copying files according to their date and time stamp. While we are making backups regularly we can specify time which files those are changed specified time to backup. For example we take backup in following periodic dates.
- 01-04-2017
- 08-04-2017
- 15-04-2017
- …
We can specify date where we will only copy files changed after that time. In this example only files those changed after 15-04-2017 will be copied.
$ xcopy \project \project-backup /d:15-04-2017
Verbose Operation
Other useful feature is printing files during copy operation. This will give us feedback about the copy operation. We will use /f
option for this.
$ xcopy /f Downloads Downloads-backup

Copy Only Files Existing Destination
While copying files from source to the destination we can set a rule which will only copy the files existing in remote destination.
$ xcopy /u Downloads Downloads-backup
Copy Hidden and System Files
Windows have different type of files attributed like System
and Hidden
. These files especially used by operating system or related applications. These files are not copied by default. In order to copy these type of files we will provide /h
$ xcopy /h Downloads Downloads-backup
Exclude Files and Extension For Copy
While copying we may need to not copy some file names or extensions. For example a developer do not want to copy binary or temporary files. So we need to exclude these type of files and file names. We will create a file which stores file names and extensions line by line those will be excluded. We have a file ex.txt
which have following contents.
.exe temp
We want to exclude .exe
and temp
file names and extensions
$ xcopy /exclude:ex.txt Downloads Downloads-backup