The previous days the following question was spinning in my mind: is it possible to automate the daily back up process? My notebook is a little bit old, my external hard disk has not many free disk space, so I was wondering: is it possible to find an efficient way to backing up my files quickly?
I answered to the previous question with this small application. What it does? Well, in short, the idea can be described in the steps that follow:
- Select a folder that contains the files you want to back up (source folder). Usually this is a main folder like “My Work”, “My Documents”, “Downloads” etc.
- Select a folder in which the files will be saved (target folder). This could be a folder in an external hard disk or USB stick.
- Pick up a date/time after which you want to back up your files. Note that the application loops through all the files of the source folder and COPIES ONLY the files that are created/modified AFTER the date/time you specified.
- Copy the files that meet the date/time criterion.
The VBA code contains some error handling for a) wrong folder paths (source and target), b) invalid characters in file paths and insufficient disk space. If the user enables the check box in the form a log file will be created containing information about the files that were been saved. So, now you have no excuse: within a few seconds you can back up all your essential files.
How to use it
The short video below demonstrates the application in use.
This file can be opened with Office 2007 or newer. Please, enable macros the first time that you run this application.
