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Robocopy replacement #

"a console backup/archive tool for Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7. It uses the same backup methods as the ntbackup or robocopy programs and thus backs up all information and meta data on an NTFS volume. The main difference is that strarc is free and open source and produces stream archives you can store on tapes, disks or anywhere else or it can create the archive stream to stdout so that it can be compressed easily using stream compression tools like gzip or bzip2. The command line switches and parameters are quite similar to the *nix tar utility and it can easily be used to clone an entire NTFS volume including everything, files, directories, their time stamps, attributes and security information, compression attribute, alternate data streams, junctions, hard links etc. It is now even possible to backup the registry database files of a running Windows system."

Here's a simple usage example from the documentation:

strarc.exe -cjd:C:\dir | strarc -xd:D:\dirbk

"This will clone the C:\dir directory tree to D:\dirbk but will not follow junctions in the C:\dir directory tree but instead clone the junction itself to the D:\dirbk location."

1. Source code available separately here
2. Attempting to clone a live system (even with the -r switch to "backup loaded registry database of the running system") to another drive failed to produce a bootable copy (after Startup Repair ran, Windows 8 booted to the login screen but stayed stuck on "Preparing Windows"), despite the promise of "How to backup a complete running Windows system" in the documentation (which does not cover shadow copies - see #3).
3. However, using one of the command line shadow copy tools in conjunction with strarc reportedly works.
4. While copying C: to E:, received a number of "Short names are not enabled on this volume" errors. Ran fsutil 8dot3name set e: 0 to resolve, though strarc also offers a "-w:8" switch which hides warnings when short 8.3 names cannot be restored.
5. Need to update emcopy.exe post and Xcopy Windows to a new hard drive

More info:

• RulerOf's comment on Robocopy vs. StrArc
• user314104's reply to ntbackup workalike for adhoc full backups in Windows 7 that's free and preferably open source
• larkee's comment on using strarc in Mirroring harddisk with compressed files with Robocopy
• tech128's reply in How to copy a directory with all permissions and junctions intact?

/windows | Oct 12, 2015

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