At work, I have a network location set up and have pointed each user’s ‘My Documents’ folder to a folder with their name on this server. The benefit to this is I can backup just a single location nightly and it includes each user’s documents in the backup automatically. Of course, users love to put virtually everything on their desktop which, obviously, does not get included in my nightly backup.

To remedy this, I have created a Robocopy command which mirrors the user’s desktop to a folder on the server:

robocopy “source_directory” “destination_directory” /V /S /E /COPY:DAT /PURGE /MIR /NP /R:10 /W:30

The source is the desktop folder and the destination is folder on the server. The great thing about this command is that the file/folder structure is mirrored every time the command runs. So if the user deletes/renames files, the server location is updated appropriately. Nifty.

I have this command scheduled to run on each user’s computer at 11:30 every night, which gives the task plenty of time to complete the sync before the server backup starts.